Oracle Windows tips Oracle Database Tips by Donald BurlesonOctober 21, 2015

 

Question:  Is it safe to deploy Oracle on Windows?  My boss laughs out loud at the suggestion that we deploy a mission critical system on Windows.  What evidence do we see that Windows for Oracle is safe?

Answer:  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.

The blue screen of death, captured on airport video

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.

 

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.

There are some huge, mission-critical databases on Oracle Windows, many using multiple blocksizes, but far and away, the lions share of Oracle databases still resides on the big 3 operating systems, AIX, HP/UX and Solaris. (at least in the USA). Things must be different down under, as I see less than 10% of my clients running Windows, but that's changing as Windows becomes more robust.

We are also entering the 2nd age of mainframe computing and we are seeing massive server consolidation just like in the 1980's. Savvy IT shops are abandoning their acres of tiny servers in favor or large monolithic machines that can support dozens of instances.

I have a client on a 32-CPU UNISYS ES7000 that consolidated over a dozen instances onto a single server. I like the UNISYS architecture because it's made exclusively for pushing data, and in some ways (e.g. the thread model), Windows has an edge over Linux.

Also see my related notes on Oracle Windows: