RE: OT Oracle Server Operating System

Oh I hate getting into these religious war topics, but. I started out in this business with a terminal (VT-240) so that one could connect to a centralized VAX. Things worked very well & there was little need for software configuration or "DLL HELL" as it is today. Things then moved to the client server world that made some sense & yes I've been into the problems thereof, like two apps that want to use different versions of Crystal Reports and/or Oracle. Now we're into thin clients that use app servers, oh joy were heading back full circle. None of these configurations has made sense in the end mainly because the bottle neck never gets fixed, just moved around. The problem with host based computing was provisioning enough cpu, memory, and disk space for everyone's needs. Basic problem was that you needed enough for the peak usage that occurred once a month and that was expensive. Client server moved the bottle neck to the individual PC and the connection it had to the backend database server. Once again one had to provision for worst case & that again was expensive. But you also had compatibility issues to boot. Now we're talking about app servers which again have to be provisioned for worst case and each app wants it's own server. Damn that's expensive as well. We have tried the Citrix route too and no it isn't working out very well, for the above reasons namely you've got these beefy servers sitting around idle 99% of the time and people still want beefy pc's for their excel spread sheets, word documents, etc. And to make matters worse someone has gotten this idea of departmental servers into folks heads so multiply the number of database and app servers by the number of departments you have. The problems with compatibility may have diminished, but the complexity has increased by a factor or two. IMHO we'll be in a mixed bag of fat clients, fat under utilized apps servers and fat under utilized database servers till hell freezes over, which ain't going to happen within my lifetime.

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of stephen booth Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 3:47 PM
To: kmoore_at_zephyrus.com
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: OT Oracle Server Operating System

On 19/07/05, Keith Moore <kmoore_at_zephyrus.com> wrote:
> I found this quote interesting: "Ellison and other Oracle executives
saw
> Raw Iron vindicating his failed network computer concept"
>
> Since I got my copy of Inforworld last night and they have a special
> report on thin clients called "Is the desktop PC History?"
>
> http://www.infoworld.com/reports/29SRthin.html

>From what I'm seeing it looks like we might be going towards slim if
not thin desktop. Still a PC but for must users all it runs locally is network logon/authentication, a basic office package (e.g. OpenOffice.org or StarOffice) and perhaps a mail client. All the big apps are presented to the user over Citrix, browser or X11 from dedicated fat servers. The biggest driver for this I'm seeing isn't the cost of buying the fat PCs, it's the cost of dealing with compatibility problems of running software from different suppliers on the same machine.

Where I work on some of our PCs, until recently, due to different software products using different versions of Oracle we had to have three different versions of the Oracle client networking software all on the same machine. (7.3.4, 8.1.7 and 9.2.0). This will work, if set up correctly. Unfortunately most of the installs were done by desktop support staff for whom Oracle is just a six letter word begining with O (i.e. they don't know anything about it) with a propensity for ignoring installation instructions, so we landed up with a lot of machines where not only did the new software not work correctly but neither did the old software as half it's support files had just been blown away and replaced with incompatible versions.

If we have remote servers delivering apps through a thin client method then we can have one app per server, or at least make sure that all the apps use the same versions of the libraries &c. It also means that if someone needs an app they don't currently have then we don't need to do a client install, we just need to change their permissions and, maybe, put a new icon on their desktop.

Stephen

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