Re: Best Oracle Platform??

Steve Neal wrote:
>
> I need to implment a new Oracle database (order processing thru' GL)
> which will have about 80 concurrent users. The total Db size will be
> about 5Gb.
>
> My questions...
>
> What is the best platform: UNIX or NT?
>
> If NT, would an Intel system (dual Pentium Pro?) be sufficient or
> should I look to DEC Alpha?
>
> The clients will initially be Win3.x with migration to Win95/NT in the
> future.
>
> TIA
>
> Steve

        I'm wondering how many of the people who have taken the oppurtunity to slam on Intel, NT or both have actually worked on any of these combinations?

        If i had to chose an OS for Oracle, after working with both NT(X86) and Unix(Solaris Sparc,Solaris X86, UnixWare), I would definitely chose Unix, as long as you have someone who is Unix familiar in house. Most of the tools for Oracle were developed with charecter mode interfaces, and work best that way. I know this is changing with Enterprise Manager, but there are still many things that are best done at the command line. If you don't want to learn or maintain a Unix system, you won't be losing much performance by going with NT. The basic administration with NT if fairly straight forward. You will simply have to find ways of scripting with out a shell, and providing remote console, ...

        Chosing between Intel or RISC is much easier. Unless you need to support a warehouse application, which should be running on a dedicated machine IMHO, or are planning on supporting 500+ concurrent users, an Intel system should serve you fine. TPC-C and TPC-D numbers support this. As long as you have the ability to add disks and memory, a machine will scale well. Rarely is the CPU the limit to how a machine scales any more. If you look at some of the TPC-C number DEC has posted you will see that they have AlphaServers 2100 configured with 3 cpu's. Installing a 4th didn't show a good cost per transaction improvement, so they opted to submit running only 3. They simpy couldn't configure enough disk and memory to saturate it. What you do gain with going with a RISC system running Unix are better HA(High Availability) and admin tools. However, you can now order volume management and other HA and admin tools for Solaris X86 and SCO UnixWare, so this is probably going to be less of an issue now than it was a couple of years ago.

        Specing a good Intel box is harder than chosing to run on Intel, however. When you buy a machine from Sun, HP, DEC, or IBM, you buy knowing that they have tested hardware for compatability and performance. That is part of the premium you are paying. In the Intel world, there are few people who test thier machines like this. Compaq and HP come to mind, and I know there are a couple of others. In other words, buyer beware. Two PPro 200 won't perform exactly the same, or even simalarly. Things to look for are, peer PCI buses instead of mezanine, cache size per processor, total cache size, maximum available memory, HBA(SCSI, IDE, FiberChannel), network adapters, power supply(a dead machione isn't to fast), on board diagnostics. If you keep this in mind, you can source a no name Intel box that screems, but once again, it takes some knowledge.

        My recomendation based on this? Find a local reseller who you are comfortable with, purchase a name brand Intel Server(HP Netserver LX, Compaq Proliant 5000), and run Solaris X86 or SCO UnixWare(Not OpenServer, never OpenServer, OpenServer yuch!), whicher the reseller has knowledge of. You won't be dissapointed.

Brian Meek
meek_at_connectix.com Received on Wed Jan 08 1997 - 00:00:00 CST