Re: Oracle 7.1.6 and SunOS 2.5.1 and greater

The real world is where you may not have a full degree of control in new organisation. I used to be an Oracle Consultant for 4 years till about a year ago. Then, I was continously upgrading my customers to the latest releases [OracleApplications]. Now, here, in this role .... this company has been running a mix of 7.3 to 8.1.5 in different manufacturing facility [every new facility was setup with the *current* release but older ones were not upgraded except for those from 7.1 to 7.3 during 1998-1999 for Y2K].
Almost all the servers running older releases are Compaq Alpha. Oracle 8.1.7 and above require the EV5.6 Alpha chip or above. Guess how many servers are running EV5.6 ? Only those purchased in the last 3-4 years. Not older ones. The older servers barely have enough disk-space to add a new 8.1.7 ORACLE_HOME [where I have been able to find machines running EV5.6 and get down-time, but no additional budget for hard-disks and time to rebuild RAID arrays, I've had to install 8.1.7 into /redo file systems].

Now, those applications running on Solaris boxes are quite easier to upgrade to 8.1.7 or 9i -- which we are doing.

Currently, we do not have the budget to upgrade the Alpha hardware to support 8.1.7 or higher. We've lost a lot of money in 2001 and are still suffering quarterly losses.

Before I came in, no-one knew that almost all the installations had already been desupported [save for some new datawarehouse and portal implementations --- all the 24x7 manufacturing databases had already been desupported by Oracle].

That is the real world.

And again, there are people who are quite happy running their current [our "older"] releases. Software doesn't "break-down". It will continue to work consistently and reliably. Older releases will require support only if you try to change their usage / change their inputs / run different applications. Code that has been running for years will continue to keep running as long as there are no changes to it and no new expectations of it. What 'breaks-down" is hardware over the years. Newer software releases generally require newer hardware as well.

What is the cost of running desupport software, I've been asked. When would we need support or patches or upgrades, I've been asked. Oh yes, everyone agrees that we must upgrade to supported releases. But there is a cost of upgrading and there is no significant visible benefit of upgrading of you're running the same application, the same program-code and the same inputs and outputs for the software.

Like I said, I don't recommend running unsupported software.

Hemant

"NorwoodThree" <norwoodthree_at_my-deja.com> wrote in message news:ba03e2c.0206140924.2a0512bd_at_posting.google.com...
> Hey Hermant, you most definately dont reside in the "REAL" world
> because anybody with any skill, knowledge, or professionalism knows
> that running critical apps on desupported software is incompetant,
> stupid, uneducated and irresponsible. You sure as hell would never
> work in my organization.
Received on Sat Jun 15 2002 - 22:22:30 CDT