RE: OT Oracle Server Operating System

>> 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.<<

1- Ice can also burn so how do you know hell isn't already frozen over? 2- I agree with you anyway.

If anything the problem is getting worse not better. We never finished migrating off the mainframe. It was supposed to go away more than a decade ago. Today we have two mainframes as we provide our own disaster recovery site. We still are doing new development work on the mainframe and now have web pages into our non-rdbms mainframe database.

Naturally we have to run two RDMBS products and use a dozen programming languages: COBOL, PL/1, mainframe assembler, Visual Basic, Visual C, Pro*C, Forms and Report Writer, Unix Shells, JCL, DOS batch, and SAS running on two or three versions of UNIX, NT and XP, plus OS-Z and until fairly recently VMS. These are just the languages I can think of off the top of my head. Throw in a couple dozen vendor products that have to be interfaced and apply the same general name to different applications that run on different platforms and pretty darn soon working in IT is going to start to get messy.

The only way IT will get better is when top management sits down and makes aligning IT to the business a daily task instead of mostly ignoring it and leaving IT to either individual departments or a central group that top management ignores.

Just my opinion.
-- Mark D Powell --

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Goulet, Dick Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 4:09 PM
To: stephenbooth.uk_at_gmail.com; kmoore_at_zephyrus.com Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: 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"
>

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