Oracle under Solaris x86? Does it exist, or do we use generic?

        I've never experienced such frustration dealing with the simple issue of "availability". When it became clear my Development colleagues wanted to move an Oracle application over to a new Compaq ProLiant 5000, the question of Operating System had to be dealt with. I originally planned to go with UnixWare, which we've used for several years with good result.

        In discussion with Oracle, we were advised that since Sun is a
(the?) premiere development platform, new versions would appear first under
Solaris, then later on other platforms (like UnixWare). Since we expected to get a Solaris (Sparc) server for other purposes anyway, and I have some experience with x86, I decided to go with the Solaris x86 release. Some time later we received instead an *Intel SVr4* release, with no mention of Solaris. Now they tell me there is no Solaris x86 release?

        As best I can tell, the "Intel SVr4" release is appropriate to, say, AT&T UNIX or NCR MP-RAS, which lacks the advances in Solaris 2.6 (multithreading,  Java support, etc.) Later I get a response on the Net indicating that a Solaris x86 version *does* exist, which was confirmed by my reseller.
(Makes sense to me. It's just a recompile, right?) So we wait and wait for
the substitution, and what do we finally get? *Intel SVr4*. The reseller is now told by the Oracle rep that an x86 doesn't exist!

        At this point I'm ready to swing back to the UnixWare port (which definitely exists for the Workgroup edition, but we'll be running the full-blown Server product) unless someone can direct me to someone at Oracle who can confirm conclusively that the product *does* exist, that it is equivalent to the Sparc release, and that Oracle is ready to support it.

        Thanks in advance. Received on Tue Jan 27 1998 - 00:00:00 CET