Re: Oracle on NT vs. UNIX - What are the Issues?

Art <amarshall_at_idcomm.com> wrote:
> We are deciding which operating system on which to place an Oracle
> Transparent Gateway Server. Since it will be servicing multiple databases,
> it must have high availability.

That is the critical point: "It must have high availability."

> What are the issues and your points of view concerning a choice between the
> two operating systems? [..]

If high availability is a core requirement, then issues of cost are secondary. My site has converted from UNIX (on Alpha) to NT (on Compaq) servers for our Oracle7 databases, both 7.2 and 7.3.

Since 12 May 1997 there have been an average (arithmetic mean) of 1.02 unscheduled database outages per day, across eleven servers.

There has never been a contiguous seven-day period without an unscheduled database outage.

"Unscheduled outages" include database crashes, OS crashes, and other failures (e.g. SQL*Net listener no longer working) which could only be corrected by shutting down Oracle and/or the NT server as a whole.

It is tempting, I know, to suspect that these failures are the result of a low level of expertise at the OS or Oracle level. I can only say that we have several aggregate DBA-decades of experience on site, and roughly the same level of experience with NT administration. (I don't know exactly how many MCSEs we have on site at the moment, sorry.)

If high availability is a requirement for your environment, I suggest you use a reliable operating system (e.g. Solaris) and find a good system administrator to keep it working well.

-bn
(the domain is really "enteract.com") Received on Wed Apr 15 1998 - 11:41:45 CDT