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Oracle Windows tips
Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting
October 21, 2007
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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:
