Re: Oracle on Linux enhancement request, need your support!

From: Pei L. Ku <pku_at_gte.net>
Date: 1998/05/03
Message-ID: <6iieak$9kv$1@gte2.gte.net>

I play with Linux as well, and I do Oracle DBA contract work for a living. I can understand the desire on the part of Linux community to have an Oracle port on Linux. However, being an ex-Oracle employee, I have a hard time conjuring up hard incentives to motivate Oracle Corp to embark on such an endeavor. My reasoning is as follows:

Assuming Linux commnuity is advocating for a cost-free Oracle on Linux, how are you going to convince Oracle to spend development money on a port that will essentially be a zero-revenue (or worse, negative earning) port? After all, Oracle is a proft-seeking business.
Assuming the Linux community is willing to pay licensing fee for an Oracle port, issues surrounding tech support can still be sticky: If you see an ORA-600 error on Linux, who do you call? How do you know if it's an Oracle problem, a Linux problem (which flaver/version/patch of Linux), or a hardware issue?

On the other hand, this could be a bonanza for Oracle if their Tech Support charges Linux users for tech support by the minute (say, $4.00/min, based on an average of $240/hr rate for a typical consultant from Oracle Consulting) with no expressed or implied gurantee to resolve the tech issues (since the techincal problem could be OS/HW related). Of course the user will get charged for the time they are put on-hold and the time the techical support 'researched' the problem. ;-)

I'd doubt Oracle would release source code to the Linux community (or any place outside of Oracle, for that matter). I'm sure Sybase, Informix, IBM, and a sleuth of other companies would love to look at the guts of Oracle.

BTW, knowing Oracle's architecture and porting strategy, I believe it would be fairly simple to port Oracle to Linux. However, unless the business issues I outlined above can be addressed, I don't expect to see Oracle on Linux anytime soon...

later

Pei

David Sisk <davesisk_at_ipass.net> wrote in article <lbM21.19$P3.1926206_at_news.ipass.net>...
> Fellow Linux users:
> I have posted several questions to this newsgroup, and I have been very
> impressed with the quality of the responses, as well as the whole Linux
> community in general. I'm installing Caldera's OpenLinux Base
distribution
> on a different PC right now (yes, I'm a newbie!), and I'd like to do what
> little I personally can to help this O/S grow in popularity and even
> successfully compete with Microsoft WindowsNT for corporate marketshare.
> To contribute my little piece to the puzzle, I have gotten an enhancement
> request generated at Oracle Corporation to provide a Linux port of
Oracle8
> and other tools. (Enhancement request# 663419, the text from the request
is
> attached below.) To my understanding, none of the major database vendors
> currently have a version of their core database product for the Linux
O/S,
> although I believe all of them are being asked for it. From my
perspective
> as an Oracle database administrator, one of the happenings that would
> definitely help push the Linux O/S into corporations (and allow it to be
> taken very seriously as an alternative to MS Windows95 and MS WindowsNT)
> would be for the major database vendors to provide product offerings for
> Linux.
> Oracle Corporation (supposedly) periodically reviews enhancement requests
> and looks at input from user groups, IOUG-A enhancements voting, and
number
> of TAR's (technical assistance requests) logged against the respective
> enhancement requests. They already have the enhancement request, so if
> anyone wants to help push, here's what you can do:
> 1) If you are a member of the Internation Oracle User's Group -
America's,
> you can vote on this enhancement request at the next round of voting this
> year. See www.ioug.org for details.
> 2) If you are a member of a local Oracle user's group, type up a simple
> petition stating that "The following member's of the xxx Oracle User's
Group
> would like to see Enhancement Request# 663419 'Linux port of ORACLE8'
> implemented". Have the user group members sign the petition, and mail it
> to:
> ORACLE Corporation
> Support Sales & Customer Services
> 500 Oracle Parkway
> Redwood Shores Ca 94065
> 3) If you are currently an Oracle customer and have purchased support
> services, then you can call in a TAR. Simply indicate that your company
> would like to see Enhancement Request# 663419 "Linux port of ORACLE8"
> implemented. Do this in addition to #1 and/or #2, as Oracle product
> managers review the volume of TAR's pointing to enhancement requests.
> 4) If the above two options aren't available to you (if you're not
already
> an Oracle customer), then call the Support Sales & Customer Services at
> 1-800-392-2999, and let them know that you'd like to see Enhancement
> Request# 663419 "Linux port of ORACLE8" implemented.
> Feel free to post a copy of this on any other newsgroups or websites that
> you may know of.
> Thanks and kindest regards to everyone!
> Dave Sisk
>

> > Enhancement Request#: 663419
> > CREATE_ENHANCEMENT
> > ENH_COMMENTS:
> > Provide a port of the ORACLE8 enterprise data server and other ORACLE
> > tools and components for the LINUX operating system. Use ORACLE8 for
> > SCO Unix as the starting point, as several companies have already
> > gotten the SCO Unix port of ORACLE to run LINUX, after some tweaking
> > and customization of the O/S.
> > END_ENH_COMMENTS
> > HEADLINE: Linux port of ORACLE8
> > SEVERITY: 2
> > PLATFORM_SPECIFIC: N
> > COMPONENT: RDBMS
> > COMPONENT_VERSION: 8.0
> > RDBMS_VERSION: 8.0
> > BUSINESS_NEED:
> > As you may already know, the LINUX operating system is gaining
> > popularity very quickly. LINUX (one of the many flavors of unix) is
> > available for Intel x86 platforms, PowerPC platforms, Sun SPARC
> > platforms, Digital Alpha platforms, etc. LINUX is also reportedly one
> > of the top 5 O/S's used for commercial web-servers and ISP's. Leading
> > industry journals and analysts are indicating that LINUX has found
> > it's way into Corporate computing because of it's functionality,
> > stability, inexpensiveness, peformance, and portability over several
> > hardware platforms. Industry journals are predicting that LINUX will
> > begin to battle with WindowsNT for marketshare over the next several
> > years. LINUX will provide 64-bit operation on the upcoming Intel
> > Merced processor long before WindowsNT. Finally, there is rumor of an
> > initiative underway to enhance LINUX to natively support the NUMA
> > specification (shared-disk and shared-memory clustering across nodes)
> > on Intel platforms, thus allowing it tremendous scaleability and entry
> > into competition with other enterprise-level operating systems.
> > Providing an Oracle8 port for LINUX will not only help improve the O/S
> > popularity, it will provide another low-cost, multi-hardware platform
> > on which to run Oracle products and more marketshare for Oracle
> > Corporation.
> > BASE_BUG:
> > STOP
>
>
>
>
Received on Sun May 03 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT