Re: Oracle for Linux

> Have you ever used Linux ? If you have you would not be asking me this question !

I'm not the one you posted originally - but I HAVE used Linux, so I thought I might be able to add something here.

> I can give you over a 100 reasons to choose Linux over say, NT,
> Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Netware.

In *very limited circumstances*, this may well be correct.

> We have all of these OSes except for Netware at work. But we prefer
> to
> use Linux. Becasue its faster (more than twice as fast as Solaris on > same
> machine, according to BYTE benchmark), more efficient, much more > stable
> (personal experience), much more secure (known security bugs get fixed
> on Linux first before on any other platform), better driver support, > > better
> and much more powerful software packaging system, easy and powerful
> administation and installation ....

Well, I've used HP-UX, SCO, UNIXWARE, AIX, Solaris AND LINUX, and I wouldn't agree with much in the above statement. :-)

> Now please give me one reason why you would NOT use Linux. If you > > have
> not used Linux yourself then you are not qualified to answer.

Well, I have used Linux a lot - and I think I can CALMLY comment:

1. Oracle do not support Linux. For most companies this is sufficient to completely reject the product as an Oracle platform, and quite rightly so. Would you like your business running on an unsupported system?
2. Linux does not offer the scalabilty of our other UNIX systems. Are you running Linux with 256 way SMP or MPP? Do you have a 10G (which is small) or bigger DB running on Linux? Do you use clustered Linux? Do you use fault-tolerant Linux? ...No, thought not.
3. No Linux support from vendors of most third-party support, development and monitoring tools. Yes, Linux does have plenty of support, but not from most of the big guys.
4. Fragmented versions and releases. Linux is almost a world of it's own. Good knows, UNIX in general is bad enough, but 1001 different Linux releases just make things worse.
5. Linux is not available for many non-Intel chips in a version than can compare with those native UNIXs which are available. Intel chip? No problem. But there are lots of faster chips than Intel...

6,7,8,9 I could go on forever...but what's the point. This just ends up being a pointless argument, just like Mac fanatics who tell me I should "use Apple because it isn't Microsoft".

Yes, I'm a big Linux fan, but I also see it's limitations. Try to work in the commercial world on mission-critical systems and you'll soon realise the restrictions of Linux. Linux is a great system, but please try to be aware of it's limitations as well as it's good points.

Steve Phelan. Received on Tue Mar 18 1997 - 00:00:00 CET