Re: Unix or NT

With due respect to Mr. Belton, and with the understanding that I am a die-hard UNIX fan, even *I* wouldn't go as far as to recommend that if concurrent_user_count > 20 then UNIX. MS has come a long way in the past couple of years and many businesses are running happily on their OS whether with Oracle or with SQL Server.

That said, however, UNIX gets you a FAR-better chance of many-nines uptime, the option of using raw devices and/or filesystem-based async-IO devices (1), down-in-the-guts tuning options w/o having to dick around with the Registry (ugh...) along with the VERY serious and granular tools to assist same, lots of options around journaling file systems, plus all the non-database-related advantages of non-MS systems WRT normal day-to-day maintenance. And on a per-box basis, with honest-to-God customer workloads and as-released-to-the-street operating systems, a super-duper UNIX box will support far more users than a commodity box running NT, regardless of the processor count, assuming the database and application vendors are doing their part WRT platform/architecture-specific optimizations (which admittedly is, sometimes, not the case).

Another and probably more-important concern should be what O.S. your I.S. folks are most-comfortable with. It won't help to try to save $$$ by going with MS and commodity hardware if you're a UNIX shop, and you won't get 5-9s uptime no matter how much $$$ you have to buy big fat UNIX boxes if you're a DOS shop and your sysops can't edit a disklabel or figure out how to restore a database whose bits don't show up in the output of a "df" command.

I know there are lots more concerns but these are the ones that came immediately to my mind.

Hth,
WJD (1) at least I don't THINK that NT provides these options.

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http://www.keen.com Received on Fri Jun 23 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT