Advice about moving to Solaris?

I've been an Oracle DBA for about 2 years now. The role sort of fell into my lap after being an oracle app developer for the previous 7 years. I don't by any means consider myself an expert dba, but I have been able to acquire an incredible amount of knowledge in the past couple years and I'm confident in my abilities to install, configure, tune, backup and in general maintain a smooth running database.

All my DBA experience has been with Oracle running on either NT or Windows 2000. We're in the process of upgrading the hardware in our datacenter and my boss wants me to consider switching the Oracle servers over to Sun Solaris boxes.

Unix scares the heck out of me. I have basic familiarity with UNIX. I can navigate the file system, copy/move files, set permissions on files and directories and edit a text file. That's about all I can do in UNIX right now.

Is my lack more advanced unix experience an issue in regards to being a DBA for an Oracle server on unix? If so, what exactly do I need to be familiar with about the Unix OS?

Probably everything I have ever done with oracle on windows has been through sql*plus (from a remote client), svrmgrl or through a text editor (modifying the init/tns/sqlnet .ora files). I've also copied files around for backups, aside from that I am not doing much of anything at the OS level. Even most of the monitoring scripts I have rewritten run from remote machines and not physically on the database server.

I can do all of the above regardless of whether the DB is Windows, Unix or whatever OS.

There was a time several months ago where I had to add a new physical disk and extend a raid partition. I know how to do this in Windows... wouldn't even know where to begin on a Sun box.

I assume the biggest challenges are the initial installation of the oracle software on unix? Would that be correct? Does Oracle on Unix require more intimate knowledge of the OS? Do OS level parameters have to be configured that do not apply on Windows?

We have a consultant working for us part-time, 2 days a week (or on an as needed basis). He's a unix guru, but he doesn't know Oracle... but I do. Can the two of us together, be successful in making this happen (eventually the consultant's knowledge would trickle over to me)? Or would you suggest I stay with windows?

Would appreciate any advice you have to offer.

Thanks,
Gavin Received on Fri Feb 15 2002 - 00:54:43 CST