Re: native Oracle-port on Linux -- what would it take?

sweh_at_spuddy.mew.co.uk (Stephen Harris) writes:
>Why not consider a Linux platform in an environment where SCO or NT would be
>a valid platform? Why not have a Linux port of Oracle?

No problem here: Linux can certainly support a large database system. At least it has all the features that are potentially needed to do a port (or a new development) and the optimizations that may be required for larger databases can easily be done. Some remaining more fundamental problems (like large files and large filesystems) are being worked on.

Two main problems with Linux remain, though. These are a) a very heterogenous installed base (different distributions and different releases of libraries) and b) a general unwillingness to work with no-source-available type of packages.

Both Software AG and Star Division, who currently have larger packages for sale (Adabas-D SQL Database and Star Office Package) as native Linux versions, are currently facing these problems and develop strategies to deal with them. For example, both companies list exactly which distrbutions and versions of distributions have been tested with their products (such as "Suse Linux 5.0 or higher" or "Caldera OpenSomething x.y or better"). But still a great deal of support is installation support - shrink-wrapped installation as on other Unix platforms or under Windows does not work as good.

Re b): People working with Star Office 4 (SO4) have reported a certain slowness in startup, which is not visible when using the same program release under Windows on the same machine. The problem may be related to ld.so problems or with the large number of shared libraries SO4 uses. Anyway, there has been a certain hostility shown towards the Stardiv developers when they discussed the problem in de.comp.os.linux.misc. True, the group of people telling them to go away or release source has been small, but overly noisy. But this is certainly not the way to encourage porting to Linux.

Kristian

-- 
          Kristian Koehntopp, http://www.koehntopp.de
"3*666 = 1998"	-- Bruder 13 auf der Verschwoerungsmailingliste