Re: Oracle on VM

Jim Truax (jltxt_at_teal.csn.org) wrote:
: Oracle Gurus,
 

: Six months ago our organization standardized on Oracle
: as a DBMS. The managerial finger was pointed
: at me and another Systems Programmer to be Oracle DBAs.
 

: No mention was made of a preferred platform,
: although Oracle for Netware and AIX (IBM RS/6000) were
: purchased at that time. Both platforms seem to work
: well with AIX being much more robust, and better able to
: handle the heavy transaction load we eventually expect.
: We felt that we were getting a good feel for each of
: these platforms when management said that Oracle will (may)
: run on an IBM 3090 mainframe under VM. Major twist! :-(
 

: We have been caught with our proverbial pants down.
: I have heard some negative statements about Oracle running
: on VM. Any information would be extremely helpful and
: greatly appreciated.
 

: Thanks,
 

: Jim Truax
: jltxt_at_boco.co.gov

What negatives did you hear? I'm curious since most of the negative press about Oracle 'on the mainframe' seemed to have been generated by Oracle salespeople going for the quick kill on a VMS or Unix platform rather than the long-term sale a mainframe sale typically is (now that I no longer work for Oracle, I 'spose I can say that...)

I haven't been up on the latest releases, but last I heard, Oracle 6.0 was supported in the VM/XA and ESA environments, and ORACLE7 with ESA only. While Oracle was never 'architected' for the mainframe, it's certainly been ported to the mainframe with much success...expect much higher memory utilization (most end-user virtual machines don't typically require 6+ Mb, but most Oracle processes do...), and balance your I/O carefully, and you can have quite a screamer performance wise... I will agree 3270/block-mode isn't ideal for SQL*Forms, but once you adjust to a "block" mentality instead of a "field" mentality, it's workable. Also, connectivity is a minor issue as Oracle (used to, anyway) support TCP/IP, DecNet, etc...you may have to throw in some hardware to get non-IBM machines to communicate, but that would be the case irregardless. Even if you are going to do a 'client-server' thing and put sexy Forms 4.0 on Windows and Oracle on the mainframe, you'll survive...just expect a lot of page swapping since everytime a user hits tab or enter, it sends an interrupt to the box, and IBM typically works better when he's not being interrupted a lot... Oracle on IBM is in use in many big-name big-iron shops in the U.S. and Europe. Ask your salesrep for references.    Received on Sat Aug 21 1993 - 09:02:57 CEST