Re: Oracle Support on ALPHA - Problems

From: William Thompson <thompson_at_serts.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: 29 Jun 93 14:09:38 GMT
Message-ID: <thompson.741362978_at_serts.gsfc.nasa.gov>


wilsone_at_decus.org.nz writes:

>After assurances from Digital and Oracle that the Oracle RDMBS is
>supported on Alpha we proceeded to upgrade our Vax cluster to include
>an Alpha AXP 7000 machine.
 

>The Alpha itself is a great machine, very quick, and it clusters
>seamlessly with our existing Vaxes. We find, however, that when the
>rubber hits the road, that we cannot get a supported v6 Oracle version
>on the Alpha, and the promised supported v7 Oracle version is still not
>available. In the mean time our Alpha sits idle.
 

>We are currently running the majority of our Oracle databases on the
>Vaxes on v6036. We wanted to simply transfer these to a v6.0.36 version
>on the Alpha. The problems are as follows:
>- We have v6.0.36 on Alpha, but is an "unsupported" version, so we
> cannot run our live databases on that.
>- We are told v6.0.37 will be available on Alpha, "supported as a
> migration release", but "unsupported for live applications". We don't
> yet have this software version, and can't run live databases on it
> anyway as it is still not supported.
>- We have just received v7.0.13 for Alpha, which is a supported version.
> The catch with this is that it is supported only on AXP VMS v1.0. We
> are running AXP VMS 1.5, which allows us to cluster the Alpha with the
> existing Vaxes - AXP VMS 1.0 does not cluster. Once again we cannot
> put our live applications on this version.
 

>We would very much like to see v6.0.36 supported on Alpha, and supported
>on AXP VMS v1.5, as this would allow us to move our applications without
>requiring a simultaneous upgrade of our live applications to Oracle v7.
 

>I would like to hear from anyone who is running Oracle on Vax, and have
>purchased an Alpha machine, or are considering doing so. Thanks.

This is disturbing to me. I hope this is just a temporary problem caused by Alphas being so new. I'm involved with two groups who want to use Oracle on Alpha workstations in the somewhat near future. One group wants to use it in a VMS cluster, as in the posting above, whereas the other, which I'm more directly involved in, wants to use it with the OSF/1 operating system. Is anyone aware of any problems using Oracle with OSF/1 on an Alpha workstation?

Bill Thompson Received on Tue Jun 29 1993 - 16:09:38 CEST

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