Re: platform/version choices

Piet de Visser <piet.devisser_at_wanadoo.be> wrote:
>Group,
>
>As an occasional visitor to the group,
>I may be opening an old discusion.
>Please forgive me.
>
>I'm involved in startup of a Terabyte "datamart" project
>and I'm looking to pick some of your brains on the following questions
>
>1 - Choice of unix platform; any one of (alphabetical):
>Compaq, HP, IBM, SUN.
>Factors to weigh in:
> - Oracle's best, stable, track record (ora-dev platform)
> - ease of management, scalability.

Yes.

If there was a clear "best choice" here, then they'd own the market, all Unix OSes from these vendors offer pretty similar features with only minor differences. Choose the one that your sysadmins are most familiar with, or if you want to wind them up, the one they're least familiar with.

The hardware vendors will attempt to blind you with benchmarks and confusing multi-colour graphs with carefully chosen axes. Getting real information is difficult, but a rule of thumb is the competitor they dis most is the one they're most scared of. If all else fails, go with the one that buys you the best lunch.

My only serious comment is that NUMA architecture machines can be difficult to work with. Oh, and you want to check that the version of Oracle you want is available on the architecture you're looking at (see, for example, Metalink note 162691.1). This isn't meant to discourage you from IBM or Compaq, all vendors have these sort of issues.

>2. Version of Oracle, 817 or 90x.
>Factors:
> - Stability
> - Perormance / features
> - ease of management.
>pro v817 : proven technologie, most bugs should be found by now
>pro v90x : more features, possibly better perforance.

If you're just at the start of a large project now, I'd go with 9i, by the time you roll-out 9i will be fairly mature, probably with r2 out and most major bugs in r1 will have been found and patched in standard patch sets.

-- 
Andrew Mobbs - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~andrewm/