Re: Netware v Unix

Mike Hill <hthillm0_at_brtst1.wgw.co.uk> wrote:

>Having spent most of my working life with ORACLE on Unix I now find
>myself forced into using Netware.
>
>Any Experienced Netware/DBAs out there can warn me of any pitfalls,Or
>alternatively advise me of the benefits of using The UnixWare Product
>from SCO.

Accessibility to the O/S can sometimes be a problem. There's no way to get an O/S prompt in NOS except through the system console or a DOS program called rconsole. Either way though, access to one console gives you access to every NOS console on the network. Not all network administrators are willing to expose such a security hole. Not mine anyway.

Interaction between the O/S and DB isn't as easy either. In UNIX, you can write shell scripts to do a lot of things with the DB. There's nothing like that in NOS. Consider a script that simply verifies command line parameters to make sure they're valid before passing them to sqlplus. Can't be done in NOS. You'd probably need to use a DOS batch file for such adventures and I don't find batch files any where near as powerful as ksh.

This is a particular PITB if you're trying to use SQLLOAD's direct path. You can't do that across a network. For direct loads, you need console access. And even if you could do it from a DOS/Windows client, what if you want to load several tables simultaneously? DOS is single tasking. Once again, you can't do it. This may not be important to some folks but I administer a data warehouse. Concurrent direct loads is a must for me.

There's also seems to be a problem with dead connection detection. I've got the listener's timeout value set at 10 minutes but I've seen sessions for dead SPX connections hang around for days until I bounce the DB.

Make sure you get the latest version (7.2.2.4) I think. Earlier versions had bugs that sometimes brought the entire server down. 7.2.2.4 seems to be very stable. I've been running it for 2 months now without a single problem.

One other thing. Oracle for NOS doesn't support default user names. In other words, you can't set up a user as 'IDENTIFIED EXTERNALLY'. I hate having to hard code passwords into plain text script or batch files but with Oracle for NOS, there's no other option.

One benefit though is that NOS doesn't seem to have the same file size limitations as many unix systems. On HPUX, I can't create datafiles bigger than 2g. On NOS it's not a problem.

Performance is pretty good on NOS too. This surprised me. I've been told (never been able to verify it) that NOS multitasks like Windows does - non-preemptively. I expected this to cause performance problems but it really hasn't. In fact it runs most queries faster than my HP G30.

HTH

--
Chuck Hamilton
chuckh_at_dvol.com

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