Re: O/S Choice for Database Servers

  You make good points and talk from a logical point of view. I talk from my experience alone, and it may very well be that I ran into crappy windows administrators and good unix administrators, but overall stability of the system has been always better on unix than on windows as far as my personal experience goes. This has biased me against windows as a server OS.

   On the other hand, I have similar experiences with HP-UX and have had more than enough problem with AIX, as well as some weird reactions from the CRS on linux. On the other hand, as it is far less common for people to be familiar with Unix and hardcore unix admins are usually very curious people, they tend to be better at their job. Again, this is my personal experience.

   And here I bring you to MS SQL Server. In itself it's not a bad RDBMS, it's actually quiet good, however it's amazing how many SQL Servers you find out there that are not properly configured and maintained. Now, I've found a few Oracle dbs like that, but far less than SQL Servers o MySQL (which I must admit have little to no experience with).

  I understand where your rant comes from, this kind of bias against an OS is uncharacteristic of this list, but please, try to understand where the bias comes from...

  Oh, and btw, the fact that Oracle released a patch for RedHat speaks to the openness of RedHat and not to the compatibility of Windows.

cheers
Alan.-

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 6:15 PM, Niall Litchfield < niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> subject changed so I can rant. This is my response to the recent thread
> about how to install Oracle in a Windows environment. I've changed the
> thread because I think that the main points were answered before we got
> here. What we then saw was a surprising (for this list) attribution of
> unevidenced or ill thought out suggestions about using Windows as a server
> O/S for Oracle Databases:
>
> <rant>
>
> - Windows platform is not fully compatible with Oracle products so
> these problems always appear.
>
> Really? As opposed to RedHat Linux where Oracle have gone to the bother of
> a kernel patch for the o/s itself. Every major version of Windows has had
> the current or next release of the database certified on it sharpish.
> Similarly look at the certification speed for Oracle E-Business on windows
> compared to (say AIX).
>
> - If your production servers are installed at windows platform ,You
> shouldn't let them to join windows Domain at installation phases, as this is
> a wrong decision for running time performance.
> You should use a Workgroup or primary DNS suffix which allow you to
> avoid such problems you may face at joining windows Domain.
>
> Again a statement with no evidence presented. In general AD does a good job
> of policy and security management and certainly a better job than managing
> an estate of Windows servers one at a time. If you haven't got your dns
> management right and tied into the domain (which the latter suggests, then
> you haven't got AD setup correctly)
>
>
> - Clusterware was installed with a domain account. That proved to be a
> fatal mistake when this particular domain the account belonged to was shut
> down as part of a migration project. After a scheduled reboot Clusterware
> wouldn't start at all. End of the story was a complete rebuild of the
> environment using local administrator accounts.
>
> The fatal mistake here would seem to be not correctly identifying the
> dependencies in the migration project.
>
>
> - Windows is just play box it is never for server installation if you
> are using oracle,db2 (I do not whether db2 is avaialble on windows) kind of
> big databases.
>
> I must remember to tell that to the ten billion dollar a year manufacturing
> operation that run their multi-terabyte SAP datawarehouse on Windows. :)
>
>
> - Oh, and when you have to do maintenance on a DB on a Windows server
> and the IT Security department tells you NOT to log in to ANY server using
> your AD account because there's a virus in the network and we need to
> contain it..
>
> What has the AD account got to do with this scenario - it makes no
> dfference to virus propagation if you log in as local Admin or a domain
> account with admin rights to the rights inherited by the executable code on
> your machine.
>
> - . and when they have to reboot a production DB server to apply a
> hotfix (which happens a lot more often than unix patches)
>
> - run up2date on your Linux box and count the number of updates released -
> it *will* surprise you. Because Linux admins don't update their servers for
> known security holes in general, and windows admins do is not really a great
> argument for frequency of patches.
>
> - or when they need to reboot the DB server because it's been up more
> than 90 days straight... well, that's when you know the platform you've
> chosen is probably not the wisest choice.
>
> nope that's when you know that the admin doesn't understand the platform. I
> must reboot every 90 days is an admission that something that I don't
> understand is happening.
>
>
> </rant>
>
> I had that <insert name of local controversial fugure> in the back of my
> cab once :)
>
> --
> Niall Litchfield
> Oracle DBA
> http://www.orawin.info
>

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