Re: Oracle NT vs Oracle UNIX

On 15 Sep 1998 18:11:08 GMT, "Andy Ross" <ross_at_dca.net> wrote:

>Can anybody give me any advice or share any experiences that would help me
>decide whether to deploy a new Oracle database on NT or UNIX. I'm
>interested in all pros and cons. Also, would you recommend Oracle 8 or
>7.x?

Issues:

Money - UNIX systems could cost more, both in term of up front costs and total cost of ownership. I say 'could' because large NT servers can get expensive. This includes the cost of a good UNIX sysadmin in relation to the cost of a NT admin.

Scalability - UNIX will scale better than an NT. You can listen to all of the hype you want from Microsoft and Compaq but there is no way a Compaq Pro-anything can match the capacity of a well designed UNIX system. Example: I've seen UNIX systems with as many as six SCSI (fast/wide/diff in this case) in a machine with each controller having a handfull of disks attached totalling around 100 GB. Four of the controllers shared a high speed backplane and the other two had a seperate backplane. You could lay the data out on the disks so that you could get some amazing throughput. Granted that capacity will come at a cost so you have to be carefull.

Stability - A UNIX system can be rock solid, it can also be as sad as an NT box but that just means you hired a crappy Sys Admin (see the money issue). UNIX systems are the systems of choice for 24x7 or anything where downtime means lost money. To give you an example most UNIX systems support a filesystem called JFS which is a tranaction based system. If your system crashes there is a very small chance of losing data and the filesystem recovery time is very quick even for multi-gigabyte filesystems.

One of the tricks is that UNIX systems are harder to design than NT systems because NT systems don't give you a lot of choices, UNIX systems give you too many. There are also more people out there that know NT. I can't really speak for the quality of either group of sysadmins since I only know a handfull of people in both groups. Received on Thu Sep 24 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT