Re: Pentium or Risc processors for an Oracle Database?

Alex,

To arm yourself with facts rather than biased conjecture, take a look at the benchmark sites (www.tpc.org and ecperf.theserverside.com ).

Besides the here and now, you also need to consider industry trends:

(1) The future of the Alpha chip is in great doubt - not enough installed
base means not enough funds for R&D giving rise to a widening performance gap.
(2) The Intel 64 bit Itanium chip has been a dissapointment.
(3) Intel's power base in workstations gives it the money to invest in
server solutions.
(4) Intel and AMD take turns leapfrogging each other in the MHz wars. We
will have 3 and 4 GHz chips within the year.
(5) Sun's Ultrasparc III cu currently tops out at 1.015 GHz. So even though
they have 64 bit architecture, the chips have less power than 32 bit Intel competitors.
(6) Sun has been making moves in the Linux arena, causing much consternation
in the Solaris camp. Perhaps Sun Linux is Plan B if their CPU chips continue to lag Intel. They also announced belated plans to release Solaris 9 for Intel - perhaps this is Plan C.

Fortunately, Oracle is readily portable between platforms. For example, at my company we often develop under Win 2K and then deploy under Solaris. So even if you need to change your mind about platform, its usually a simple job to migrate.

The other factor is industry bias. The saying in the 1970's was that nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM. Today, the same can be said for Oracle running on Solaris. If you recommend Oracle under Windows - Intel and the project goes sour, there will be plenty of people to question that decision. Most of them on this NG.

But Oracle under Windows runs just fine for thousands of users. The hardware is cheaper and you don't need an expensive Solaris SysAdmin.

John Received on Fri Oct 11 2002 - 17:25:13 CDT