Re: Developing an Oracle App - Does the Server OS matter

From: Joel Garry <joel-garry_at_nospam.home.com>
Date: 1999/01/27
Message-ID: <slrn7atcsq.bs.joel-garry_at_home.com>#1/1


On 26 Jan 1999 14:08:37 GMT, Michael Smith <msmith_at_kepner-tregoe.com> wrote:
>We are having a company develop an enterprise application for us that will
>use Oracle8 as the back-end database. There's been some question as to what
>server/os they should use for their development. Here are the stats:
>
>* 5 Developers
>* 5 Testers
>* Development in Delphi with ADO, DCOM, VC++
>* Committment to NT as the server (since they'll probably be developing
>NT-Services also)
>
>They had originally spec'd a $40K+ Dual-CPU DecAlpha with NT as the server,
>but we are questioning whether that is overkill for the development team.
>
>Our recommendation, for a development-only box, would be a Intel-Pentium2
>(or 3) 400Mhz box with 256MB+ RAM and around 10G HD (preferably one
>scaleable to 2 CPU's).
>
>The price difference is tremendous, but in my opinion the affect on
>development should be nil, however their opinion is that they need the
>bigger server for testing performance. However, with only a few users doing
>testing what difference will it make. Besides, we have already decided to
>use an outside testing service for the load testing.

Because the testing they will be doing will start off as non-optimized, and 5 people at a time doing that sort of stuff will kill the Alpha even. For that matter, I've seen _one_ "good" test bring a sparc to it's knees for hours.

You might consider letting them test on their own boxes, looping back through sqlnet. This can let them screw it up however they want and you can give them a prototypical export to go back to. Then QA to a combined instance to look for inter-module and upgrade conflicts. Remember, there are several different types of performance, and the tuning of SQL statements by each developer has the greatest potential for cheap results.

>
>
>So, here's my question:
>Does the back-end server OS/Hardware matter, given that it's always running
>Oracle8, when it comes to development. My feeling is that if I'm developing
>an app to run against an Oracle8 database, then it shouldn't matter whether
>the back-end DB is on an Intel/NT, DecAlpha/NT, Linux, or Sun box, as long
>as my client computer can connect to it. Does this make sense, or am I way
>off base in my assumptions?
>

The end result shouldn't matter, but assuming end quality before the end is off base. People are still way more expensive than computers.

>
>
>Thanks,

>
>Mike Smith
>Sr. Analayst

jg

-- 
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Received on Wed Jan 27 1999 - 00:00:00 CET

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