General myths about Oracle on OS/390

OS/390 system administrators are often extremely negative about running Oracle on MVS. One should explain to them that it definitely not a thread to them. In fact, running Oracle on MVS will draw more people to the mainframe, creating more work and demand for OS/390 systems.

• Myth: Oracle was developed on Unix and is therefore not optimized for OS/390.

  Fact: Oracle is always on the cutting edge in exploiting platform specific features in their operating system ports.
  Oracle on OS/390 makes extensive use of OS/390 facilities like RACF, VSAM, SMF, Media Manager, Cross Memory Facility, Coupling Facility, etc.
  

• Myth: Oracle on OS/390 is always released way behind the rest of the Unix world.

  Fact: Oracle never releases the first Oracle release on OS/390 as OS/390 people come to expect a slower software change rate and less buggy software.
  The current release for MVS is Oracle 9.2 Release 9.2.0.x just like on most Unix platforms.
  

• Myth: DB/2 is the only viable database on MVS.

  Fact: This is an old IBM toilet trained belief that even ADABAS users suffer from. Oracle is more feature rich than DB/2 and had row level locking years before its competitors.