Re: Oracle On Compaq Server

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004 09:30:27 -0500, "Syltrem" <syltremzulu_at_videotron.ca> wrote:

>It's nice to hear that it works well (very well from the looks of it) for
>you.
>Problem is, you can't get the best out of those windoze machines from what I
>can see.
>
>I have OpenVMS running Oracle, Gembase 4GL, Progress rdbms & 4GL, Basic,
>Fortran, Cobol, Powerhouse 4GL, Apache, Pathworks (VMS becomes an active
>Windows domain member with this), etc, about 500 users, all on the same
>machine.
>I can install new software or patches to existing software (in a new home
>for the latter) without a need for a reboot and without affecting the
>running applications and users. I don't care about viruses and daily
>security patches.
>
>We too have a bunch of Windows boxes, each doing its own task (exchange,
>McAfee, IIS). But don't ever try to have one box running multiple softwares,
>you'll start to have (more) problems. You can pile up windows servers, but
>I'd rather have just one machine to care about, knowing it will not crash on
>me or ask for a reboot every time I touch it with an install or just config
>change.
>
>I don't want to start an OS war but the fact is, windows is not made to run
>too many things on one machine, there are too many conflicts of all sorts
>that can happen. Install one little thing (a printer driver can be enough -
>I've seen it happen) and you may have to reinstall the whole machine from
>scratch because it broke something hidden in the registry or else, causing a
>conflict with your business application. That's why I won't trust it for
>software my business is dependant upon to survive.
>
>Regards,

True story: A few years ago we had a problem with a c/s app connecting to an Oracle db (all on various Win machines). After much digging and checking with MS, it was found that we needed to apply a patch to ADO. Fair enough . . until we found that the only way to apply the patch was to apply an update to IE. What the h*** does a browser have to do with a non-MS db interface? But, that's what we had to do. Some time after the fact, we discovered that the IE update also upadated the system scheduler. And that update was incompatible with all of the previously scheduled jobs. What the h*** does a browser update have to do with a system scheduler? And why did an update to said scheduler silently break all of the existing schedules? All to be expected in the Windows world.

The progression of my computer experience (with a lot of overlap in chronology) has been IBM OS/360/370/etc --> ms-dos --> Windows (and OS/2) --> vms --> Windows --> unix. And the more I work with unix, the more I learn to dislike Windows. At the end of January, the IBM engineer that actually wrote the code to implement a reboot on ctl-alt-delete retired. He was quoted as saying that while he wrote the code, Bill Gates was the one that made it a household term. Received on Tue Mar 02 2004 - 14:29:56 CST