Re: OS and hardware question...

I have used Oracle in both Unix and VMS environments. If I had to choose an operating system I would go for Unix for the following reasons :-

1 Enhancements and bug fixes for Oracle products seem to become available on Unix before they are available on VMS. Presumably Oracle has a bigger and more profitable market for Unix products than for VMS products.

2 If you buy VMS, you are tied to a single supplier - DEC. My employers found that competition among Unix vendors drove down costs for hardware, software and support.

3 Developers and support staff with Unix skills are more plentiful than those with VMS skills. My employers have significant difficulties finding staff with good Oracle and good VMS skills.

If you buy a system which supports the Oracle parallel server option, you should be able to cluster a number of hosts together and balance your load between them. I believe Oracle 8 does this type of load balancing automatically. The parallel server also gives you flexibility. If one of the nodes in your cluster fails, the other nodes can pick up its workload.

I hope my opinions are of use to you and I would be interested to read the views of anybody else with an opinion on this matter.

Regards,

Richard Armstrong

In article <33D77375.FCD797F4_at_enteract.com>, Greg Carder <carderg_at_enteract.com> writes
>Hello,
>
>We are preparing a design document for system that is targeted with
>Oracle as the database server. The system is projected to have from 150
>
>to 300 concurrent users with a "large"? amount of data. "large" in our
>case being ~8million rows added to a single table per year for the
>largest table with around 160 total tables.
>
>Our question is:
>What would be the best operating system for Oracle to run on, Unix or
>VMS?
>Given the best operating system, what would be the best performing box
>to run it on? We are considering a Sun Ultra Enterprise server and a
>DEC Alpha machine currently.
>
>Any opinions with supporting reasons would be greatly appreciated!
>
>Thanks,
>
>Greg Carder
>
>
>
 

-- 
Richard Armstrong