Re: Why doesn't Oracle care about Linux as IBM does?

From: Robert Fazio <dbabob_at_yahoo.nospam.com>
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 01:38:31 GMT
Message-ID: <Xns9107DC1766843dbabobyahoocom@24.12.106.199>

"Darin McBride" <dmcbride_at_nospam.tower.to.org> wrote in news:qzpoevqrgbjregbbet.gihs7h0.pminews_at_news1.rdc2.on.wave.home.com:

> On Wed, 22 Aug 2001 17:52:30 GMT, Charles J. Fisher wrote:
>

>>3. Oracle installers have a reputation for driving users to drink.
>>   Once it's installed, however, Oracle is rock-solid.

>
> I keep telling my team that one way to reduce the number of problems
> with the product is to fail at our job. If no one can install it,
> users can never find any other problem to report!
>
> Generally, if I can't install a product, I figure that the product
> itself is likely going to be difficult, too. Then I dump it. Perhaps
> unfair, but that's the way I work. I suspect many others to feel
> similarly. And that's the way my team works.
>

Since I haven't installed on linux in a while I had to give it a try reading this thread.

Got a copy of Red Hat 7.0. Downloaded the Linux version from Technet (had some minor problems with that).

I was able to install the OS 3 times in about 4 hours. First install was just a trial run, then I had some trouble getting telnet to work (Think workstation install doesn't have it). So I installed the third time.

Installed Oracle, but the database creation failed. Went back and did some reading and found I forgot to setup the Shared Memory parameters, so I had to do a re-compile of the OS. That took about 5 hours, Using a 233 PII with 192M ram. I also have real work to do, so there were brakes. All it involved was changing some values in 2 header files, then doing the following.

make config -- hit return for every question. make dep

make zLinuz -- It came back and told me that it was too big, and to try make     
	    	   bzlinuz.  So I did

make bzLinuz
make modules
make modules_install

Then setup lilo, and run it.

This was all well documented in the /usr/src/linux directory in "would you believe" in a file named README.

After that, the creation of the database still failed, but I then of course decided to read the documentation that came with the glibc patch that was on the same page as the download for 8.1.7. Installed that patch and guess what. It worked perfectly!

Boy was that tough. I have to admit it took me a whole 2 days to take a machine that had a formatted hard drive. Attached it to my network. Installed Oracle. Created a database. Setup the Oracle Enterprise Manager. I should have really been able to do it in a lot less time than that.

I am sorry to those that think that was a big deal. I personally can't think of any of my other Unix servers that I can get Oracle up an running on in 2 days. And quite honestly if I would have just RTFM first, I would probably have saved myself a whole day.

When you consider that in order to get my 100M of Shared memory took 5 hours. The OS install took 2 hours. And the Oracle installation took about 2 hours start to finish (ignore my mistakes), That is pretty easy in my mind.

I will state it again for those that haven't figured it out. There are many good products out on the market. DB2 is one of them. They have some great features, and some not so great. SqlServer is also a great product. I am not going to lower myself into picking out the problems with either of those products, but they do have faults. My experience is with Oracle, and I won't pretend to know the others as well as I know Oracle, but ...

Don't blame a product for your own incompetence.

-- 
Robert Fazio
Senior Technical Advisor
dbabob_at_yahoo.com

Received on Fri Aug 24 2001 - 20:38:31 CDT