Re: Choice of platform

You are asking for an OS war... I've never enojoyed those (or gottem much out of them), but here is my take: "It depends." Windows has a lower ceiling than Unix as to how much it can handle, but the ceiling is very high. In other words, don't switch to Windows from a mainframe, but if the DB is small to medium sized, then it's OK.

We run Oracle on Windows here, and we do so because:

1. It has full support from Oracle. We can call Oracle for help (we have a support contract) anytime, and it is much easier to fix thing on Windows than any other O/S (We are a Windows shop here). Patches to Oracle come out for Windows fairly early, and it is easy to find Windows experts.
2. Our applications are not extremely time-critical. One minute of downtime is acceptable, and that's how long it takes to switch to the other Oracle server in case of failure (it has never happened for us). You can get even less DB downtime in case of failure on Windows (as you can with other platforms).
3. Yes, Windows breaks easier than anything else. We compensate by a) not allowing idiots near our servers, b) patching early and often, and c) Having single-purpose servers. Our Oracle servers don't do web serving, they don't share files, and they don't print anything. This gives us extremely good uptime on the database.

For just 100,000 records you could have that database running on a hand-held device (seriously), so storage volume alone will not rule a platform out. Things like concurrent connections and operations, uptime requirements and downtime tolerances, will make your decision easier. Right here we run a ton of tables (in the thousands, probably) with anywhere from 1 to 90,000,000 rows on a single-processor 1.4 GHz Windows machine. It runs very well.

Lastly, I think the answer really depends on your situation (and existing expertise). If you are a VMS shop and love the thing, then see if Oracle is desupporting it soon. If it is, don't think of staying on. We stayed on with Novell until the bitter end and payed the price ("I'm sorry, the only person at Oracle the knows Novell is not in right now. Care to leave a message or can you call back?" -- I'm not kidding. This was from Oracle support when our database had crashed a long while ago). Received on Thu Apr 03 2003 - 00:55:13 CEST