Re: Opinions Wanted on Oracle for NT

In article <336946D0.1B1D_at_mindspring.com>, Ed Jennings <jenningse_at_mindspring.com> writes:
>I've been administering Oracle on Unix for the last few years and know
>very little about Oracle for NT. A vendor has proposed a monitoring
>package for our company's infrastructure. The application will run on
>NT, and the Oracle database can be anywhere. Since this application
>will be deemed mission critical with 24x7 uptime requirement, I
>naturally recommended Unix as the platform of choice for the database.
>Our NT administrator thinks this recommendation is in error, and
>believes that Oracle on NT is a much better choice. I don't have
>sufficient knowledge of Oracle on NT to challenge her.

Wow, I'm faced with this exact same situation but with a twist. We're using a third-party product (Documentum) that sits on top of Oracle.

We've been struggling to bring up a NT version of our production (HP-UX) box (sort of a mini-server for a German site) and wondered if the problem was Oracle or Documentum related. Turns out it's a little of both.

Here's what we ran into with Oracle (currently an open ticket) -- corrupted indexes. Create an index, any index and *poof* it's garbage. Has anyone else seen this happen? We're running NT v4.0 and Oracle v7.2.3. Short term solution - we are going to release our application sans indexes to our German customers hoping that the small volume of users (18) won't notice the performance hit.

Here's some other stuff that kinda bothered me... the install of Oracle on NT is easy... too easy... it puts up an ORCL instance that (hard to believe but true) people actually use as their instance for Documentum! No thanks, we'll create our own (and you can expect to create your own too -- with SQL -- it's the only way to create a new db under NT -- now you know why ORCL is so popular, but I've digressed too far.)

Starting and shutting down our production instance is fast on Unix. On NT, it's excruciatingly slow. So slow, that our Documentum server fails to autostart because Oracle is so pokey to start.

NT doesn't have the concept of a "local" connection. All connects are via SQLnet. We've avoided SQLnet on our HP-UX production server as our clients connect via Documentum. It saved us ALOT of work on the client side installation. But now, all our clients will need SQLnet installed with the NT solution.

Rose Received on Mon May 05 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT