Oracle Support on ALPHA - Problems

After assurances from Digital and Oracle that the Oracle RDMBS is supported on Alpha we proceeded to upgrade our Vax cluster to include an Alpha AXP 7000 machine.

The Alpha itself is a great machine, very quick, and it clusters seamlessly with our existing Vaxes. We find, however, that when the rubber hits the road, that we cannot get a supported v6 Oracle version on the Alpha, and the promised supported v7 Oracle version is still not available. In the mean time our Alpha sits idle.

We are currently running the majority of our Oracle databases on the Vaxes on v6036. We wanted to simply transfer these to a v6.0.36 version on the Alpha. The problems are as follows:
- We have v6.0.36 on Alpha, but is an "unsupported" version, so we

   cannot run our live databases on that.
- We are told v6.0.37 will be available on Alpha, "supported as a

   migration release", but "unsupported for live applications". We don't    yet have this software version, and can't run live databases on it    anyway as it is still not supported.
- We have just received v7.0.13 for Alpha, which is a supported version.

   The catch with this is that it is supported only on AXP VMS v1.0. We    are running AXP VMS 1.5, which allows us to cluster the Alpha with the    existing Vaxes - AXP VMS 1.0 does not cluster. Once again we cannot    put our live applications on this version.

We would very much like to see v6.0.36 supported on Alpha, and supported on AXP VMS v1.5, as this would allow us to move our applications without requiring a simultaneous upgrade of our live applications to Oracle v7.

I would like to hear from anyone who is running Oracle on Vax, and have purchased an Alpha machine, or are considering doing so. Thanks. Received on Tue Jun 29 1993 - 00:26:49 CEST