Oracle Windows scalability & reliability Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

 

Oracle on Windows has been fighting a bad reputation for poor reliability.  Just about everyone who worked with Windows in the 1990's remembers the "blue screen of death" from Windows, and many remember the disaster that happened to anyone who dared to deploy a Windows database in the 1990's.

 

However, many IT professional don't remember the late 1980's when UNIX also had a bad reputation.  Frequent kernel panics and OS errors made it foolhardy for any IT shop to deploy a mission critical system on UNIX. 

Of course, by 19956 UNIX and Linux had become reliable and stable, and were used for even the most critical Oracle systems.

 

Today we see Oracle on Windows Advanced Server 2003 making inroads with hardcore UNIX shops.  Recent benchmarks by UNISYS show that Oracle on Windows is capable of over a quarter million transactions per minute and many of the new monolithic server provide super-stable environments for Oracle on Windows.  Oracle Windows advocate offer the following:

• Oracle on Windows allows platform unification of all Data Warehouse components, database, ETC and OLAP.
   

• Oracle on Windows leverages on the ubiquity and simplicity of the Windows operating system. Chances are, if you have a data warehouse, you have some components already running on Windows.
   

• Disk storage is a major cost for any warehouse and Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) component greatly simplified the administration and cost of the disks.

Regardless of your personal feelings about Oracle on Windows it's clear that the advent of the super-cheap and fast Itanium2 chips are driving customers into Oracle on Windows of Linux.