Re: Best Oracle Platform??

Allen Kirby wrote:

> Steve,
> You're going to get both opinions here. Being a Unix bigot,
> I would have to recommend Unix, although either would probably
> work given enough hardware. The Unix advantage is in the
> scalability of the hardware (ability to add processing power
> with just an upgrade)

This works for Windows NT as well. You can start on a 486 and go up to an AlphaServer 8400 with 12 CPUs and 28GB of memory.

> and in the tools provided with Unix.
> NT doesn't have tools like awk,sed,grep,ksh, etc. except through
> 3rd party packages like MKS Toolkit. You will find these
> utilities invaluable for doing administration and maintenance.

Maybe, but I have to say that although I do miss them, I don't miss them that much. Perl is free if you want to write scripts.

> You're also not locked into one vendor with Unix (Let's see,
> how many companies make versions of NT? You can count them on
> your nose!)

How many vendors make versions of HP-UX, or AIX, or Digital UNIX? You can count them on your nose as well.

> The tools for doing backup/recovery of
> the database as well as system recovery, remote administration,
> network administration are much more advanced and more widely
> available on Unix.

Which tools are you talking about here? An Oracle backup tool is an Oracle backup tool, no matter which operating system you're running on. If you consider tar, dump, dd, etc advanced, I'd be worried.

> Unless you are already entrenched in NT
> with every other application, consider Unix. You'll also have
> much fewer (sometimes none) hardware and operating system
> upgrades. We have applications still running on 6 year old
> (and older) Unix machines. How many six year old PCs are you
> using today?

Would anyone in their right minds use a 6 year old PC for a serious database application? Do you have figures to show that a particular version of UNIX/DBMS is updated more or less frequently than Windows NT/DBMS?
> This is not to say NT won't work well in some instances, just
> that Unix offers more flexibility.

Maybe, maybe not.

> The decision is yours,
> and neither one would be wrong.

Yep.

-- 
PJDM
Digital Equipment Corporation (Australia), Canberra, ACT
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These are my opinions, and have nothing to do with Digital.
This was typed by an infinite number of monkeys.