[CLUE-Tech] Oracle on Linux in production?

[Dan Harris]

Well, I love linux and would generally be considered a Linux bigot.  But I'm also fairly proud of how well my SQLServer2000/W2k server performs.  It is in a mission critical environment and happily serves approx 1 million DB requests per day,  7 days a week, and has *only* been down for upgrades and service packs.  It's uptime rivals all of my linux servers.  I'm not a big MS fan in general, but SQL Server is a great product (probably because Sybase wrote a lot of it!).  

Nonetheless, the achilles heel is that it only runs on Windows.  We are outgrowing the memory bandwidth of our quad Xeon Compaq box and needing to move into something like a Sun.  Of course that means I have to ditch SQL Server.  I'm currently investigating Sybase and PostgreSQL as alternatives.

I've been working with MS SQL since 4.2 (1993) and have always had excellent performance and reliability from it.

-Dan



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 not be spending the money for "clustering" or other 
> buzzword compliance so we just need the database and server software to 
> be reliable.
> 
> We will be using server-class hardware of course.  Our choices for database
> (I have no control over this, I was going down the MySQL track but got shot
> down) are: 1. MS SQL Server 2. Oracle .  The software is already written to
> support both of those and we are not going to rewrite it this month to use
> a different database engine.
> 
> 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 SQL
> on a critical production environment.  That is to say, I'm not willing to
> bet my reputation as a provider of reliable infrastructure on Micro$oft
> software.
> 
> I also would rather not spend the $bigbucks on a Big Iron UNIX server
> such as IBM, DEC Alpha, Sun, etc., if I can get away with a PC server
> running Linux to do the same basic job.  The double-your-money license
> costs for enterprise Oracle vs. SQL are not an issue.
> 
> 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.?
> 
> As most of you know I am a huge Linux evangelist.  However, I am also very
> aware that Linux is a low-end OS and only recently in the 2.4 kernel have
> enterprise-grade features started to show up.  The things I'm concerned about
> are the ability to handle large files, large data sets, move large files
> around over the network, etc.  As you may know NFSv2 is still the default,
> I think, in the Linux kernel, and you can't copy more than 2GB files to or
> from any NFSv2 software.  NFSv3 is not in the 2.4 kernels yet, AFAIK.
> 
> I just don't want to get bitten by the low-endedness of the Linux 
> architecture on this critical application.  (It is important to realize that
> Windows NT/2000/XP are low-end as well, and only recently have enterprise-
> grade features started to show up and possibly be usable on NT.)
> 
> I guess I would also like to hear stories about difficulties or problems
> using MS SQL server in the same sorts of environments, as I'm sure there are
> some people on the list who work in MS SQL server environments.
> 
> Thanks for your feedback!  Reply directly to me or to the list - I'll see
> your response either way.
> 
> -- 
> Jim Ockers - Pason (ockers at pason.com)
> Contact info:  http://www.pason.com/ockers.html
> 
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