[CLUE-Tech] Oracle on Linux in production?

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 15 Feb 2002 10:13:26 -0700 (MST)
Jim Ockers <ockers at ockers.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I need some feedback or ideas.  We are working on a major project where
> we will have a single database server back-end in a critical production 
> environment.
> We will be using server-class hardware of course.  Our choices for
> database
> are: 1. MS SQL Server 2. Oracle .  The software is already written
> to support both of those
> 
> I would rather use Oracle than MS SQL server just because I can run
> Oracle
> on a UNIX platform and I'm not convinced of the reliability of W2K/MS
> 
> I need some feedback from the user community regarding the use of Oracle
> on Linux in a production environment.  Are any of you doing this?  How
> well does it work?  Have you had any problems with the software side of
> things?  What were the nature of the problems?  Any downtime due to
> software failures, including deficiencies in the Linux kernels,
> difficulties
> scaling to accomodate growth of data or traffic, etc.?

Hi Jim.

Well, first off, Oracle is itself switching to Linux:
  http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO67867,00.html

There are perhaps arguments about reliablity of hardware, and 24x7 support
for that. IOW, will you get the same level of HW support on an intel box
as you would on a Sun? On a Sun box, you get hot-swap CPU and memory, so
there's some argument for fault tolerance in your mission-critical
application.

As far as scalability is concerned, I've heard comments about the intel
"backplane" (PCI?) being a dog compared to Sun's megabit (I think that's
what they're calling it) backplane. It's difficult to make good assesments
about that without knowing more about the characteristics of the
application.

You don't say what your application is. Since you mentioned MySQL, I'll
assume it isn't a data warehouse. Much as I hate to point it out, M$ is
faring quite well in the $/perfomance TPC benchmarks:
  http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_price_perf_results.asp

Of course, there are arguments about whether these things are "real",
mostly relating to tuning and various things being customized for the
benchmark.

I can ask on the Rocky Mtn. Oracle Users' Group list. There are a few
linux types out there.

There are other issues as well, depending on your architecture, such as
NAS or SAN for disk drives, and how well things like RAID are supported.
Oracle recommends RAID-0+1 (last I looked) for OLTP (striping, with the
LVMs mirrored). I haven't looked at how well Linux supports RAID, but that
is a part of both speed and recovery. Optimal IO will use features such as
asynchronous writes, which I don't think are supported in Linux. And,
while Xfs and ext3 are out, you might want to consider having a more
mature set of choices for filesystems. For example, with HP you can use
the "high-performace" or journaled filesystems. Also, when you look at
backup options, things such as NetBackup from Veritas, do you want to use
them, and are they supported using Linux? Do you have a need for anything
resembling a disk array from EMC, or its equivalent?

Later,
jed

-- 
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 undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
 - Thomas Paine