Ask Slashdot: On Oracle and Linux

Dirk Elmendorf asks: "A company I work with is looking at using Oracle as the database backend for a number of large scale intranet applications. They would prefer to go with Oracle under Solaris. I voted in favor of Oracle under Linux. They think that it isn't stable. Can anyone out there provide me proof or testimonials that will help me choose Linux?" How does the Linux version compare with the NT and Solaris versions of Oracle?

To those less informed...

I truly find it amazing how completely un-informed and un-experienced people come here and make these rash "Linux Rules" statements. Please, for the sake of everyone's sanity, don't post unless you know what you are talking about!

The comments I make come from a great deal of experience. I have a Linux machine on my desk, and work with Solaris machines in our server farms. I use all manner of OS and platform (I'll explain why later). Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let me comment on some of the points made above.

For starters, NT sucks. Period.

Next, Linux is a baby, an infant. Solaris has been around. Regardless of how nicely Oracle may run on Linux, Solaris is a mature commercial product. Please don't misunderstand, I love open source software and contribute to many projects myself. But Solaris is mature and rock solid. Linux is a developmental product. I could see Linux taking a major portion of the Unix market in mission-critical applications, just not yet.

Several people have alluded to the possibility of running Solaris on Intel. I fail to see the advantage of this... Solaris is designed for Sparc hardware. Take this fact into consideration. Someone mentioned Linux having better hardware support, which I wholeheartedly agree with. But until very recently, Solaris didn't have to support anything other than Sun hardware, which has distinct advantages.

One of which is scalability. Solaris is designed to be virtually unlimited in scalability.. look at Sun's Starfire machine.

Many people mentioned other issues, such as better security on Solaris (VERY VERY true), the "cleaness" of Solaris compared with Linux (also true... Solaris has a nice polish, while Linux is very evidently a work in progress... you can feel this after working with both) and the superior Solaris hardware.

These are all valid points, and I personally agree with them for the most part. But here are some simple facts. I work for a company (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) that provides international Internet bandwidth services and high-end server co-location facilities.

In the facility I'm at, we have literally thousands of servers of every OS and platform... from a couple of Crays to SGIs to Solaris to Linux to BSD to NT to Mac. Every single machine is monitored via a proprietary network monitoring system that logs and alerts us to machine failures.

Basically, it comes down to this: Solaris on UltraSPARC hardware is BY FAR the most reliable choice. Very rarely does a Solaris machine appear on our monitor, yet the Linux machines are topping the fail lists daily. The facility I'm at handles 2.5 billion requests a day (if you haven't figured out where yet, I'm sorry!). I feel I am in a unique position to make a determination of which operating system is the most solid and reliable.

I can also say what truly mission-critical systems do. One in particular (a very large search engine, with a name similar to a chocolate drink) utilizes high-end Sun Enterprise systems to serve their database application to farms of low-end BSD webserver machines. This system (obviously) works very well. There is a reason it uses this system and has never changed.

So while I may agree with the opinions of many people, and the things I stated above I truly believe, the fact remains... Solaris is a better product for mission-critical applications, for now. It'll be a few years before Linux reaches the "polished" state that Solaris is currently at.

Linux could be fine for smaller applications

We use Oracle almost exclusively at my company. My thoughts about Oracle on Linux is that 3rd party apps are lacking (hot backup, etc). And that if your application gets big at all, you'll have real trouble making Linux work on 64 processor boxes (if you succeed at all).

Sun can handle this without any problem. Also, as a shop who runs a very large Oracle application on non-Sun hardware, I can tell you that it is no fun trying to Oracle to fix something on their non-favorite platform.

New patches, fixes and product introductions for Oracle server will always happen first on Sun and sometimes that can be a real buzzkill.

My $1.59 worth (if that).

--Aaron Newsome

Different spin on your question ...

Where might one find the source for this stat, that 60% of oracle servers ship with Linux?

Oracle stability and speed vs. NT or solaris

OBstability: so far it hasn't crashed on its own volition in my installation, or in that of a friend of mine. I'm doing very small stuff. Sean, what about you?

OBSpeed: People doing informal speed tests on linux/oracle vs nt/oracle on the same hardware seem to show about a 3-5x speedup under linux.

Also solaris/x86's filesystem speed tends to be a lot slower then linux/x86 - same hardware. I expect that linux would be an ideal database server for many GB of data, as long as the SGA doesn't have to get over a GB or so (these are different things - one is disk space, the other memory. Both are dependant on the expeceted use profile of the database). This is an *estimate* from people I've spoken to - I'm not an oracle expert myself... I'm just learning how to program for it, etc.

Blow the extra money you'd have payed for a SPARC on a caching scsi controller and mirror all of your drives, and you'll have an increadibly reliable and fast server.

-Peter

Partial BZZZZZT!

We use Oracle almost exclusively at my company. My thoughts about Oracle on Linux is that 3rd party apps are lacking (hot backup, etc). And that if your application gets big at all, you'll have real trouble making Linux work on 64 processor boxes (if you succeed at all).

Well, Spectra Logic gave me a demo of Alexandria (the backup product that claims the fastest network backup. In spec'ing it in the past it looks like a great product). That demo cd has the following printed on it:

Includeing... Hot Oracle Backup!

Look at spectra logic's home page [spectralogc.com] if you want more inf.

(Disclaimer - I don't work with or for them - I just think their product is worth evaluating).

As for multi-processor - well sun is still behind SGI for that degree of scaleability. If you're intereseted in going to 64 CPU's then go SGI or wait until a big vendor adds patches to linux to make it do 64 processors well. Or gives davem or alan cox a 64+ cpu box to use. Don't hold your breath for the latter ;-)

also...

New patches, fixes and product introductions for Oracle server will always happen first on Sun and sometimes that can be a real buzzkill.

But not on solaris/x86. This is one of the lowest platforms to oracle (at least in my experience in trying to get oracle (tm) consultants to put financial software on it). It seems that linux-specific patches do come out quite quickly. And the oracle 8i pre-release server for linux and sparc/solaris should supposedly arrive at around the same time.

Sparc/solaris is definetely the unix development platform for oracle, but linux is hot right now.

-Peter

Same Situation

I was in the same situation.. We started out with Oracle on Dec Unix... Since Dec got bought out by Compaq, we decided to move to a different platform..
The choices were solaris, and linux.... We choice linux because if we needed to upgrade, it was just a standard PC.... you can buy thoses a dime a dozen.... Solaris on the other hand.. gots lots of $$$ to upgrade..
DELL put us together a nice RedHat Certified PIII with a nice raid controller..... (rackmountable!)..

Email me if you need help in the process

ChiefArcher

Maturity...

You learn it eventually....

Let's analyze this a bit.

How much are you going to save going with Linux over Solaris? Maybe $600, the price of a Solaris license. Considering hardware and database software is going to be the same price no matter which solution is chosen.

Is Linux signifigantly better than Solaris? No.
Is the version of Oracle available for Linux signifigantly better than that for Solaris? No.

In fact the opposite is true. Solaris is signifigantly better than Linux as a server platform, and Oracle has been available for Solaris for a signifigantly longer amount of time than Linux, which generally equates to a more stable product.

I'm having a hard time trying to identify what you see as being positive about the Linux solution? You save very little money, and instead increase your risk by a large margin. That risk factor outweighs the initial cost by a huge margin.

Please leave your religion at the door next time you go to work.

Oracle on Linux

Is as stable as it is on other platforms, and more efficient. We are running it on a multimillion-hit site, and it rocks.

Go for it.

Solaris vs. Linux

Assuming you have to make a choice Real Soon Now (like by the end of this month), and company's budget isn't tight, Solaris is the better choice today.

Why, you ask?

1. Oracle on Linux doesn't have a long enough track record yet. It was ported just 6 months ago. As quickly as Oracle jumped on the Linux bandwagon, Larry Ellison could change his mind and jump off again.

2. Oracle is developed on Solaris, then ported to other OS's. Any bugs get fixed in Solaris first.

3. Right now, only Oracle Standard Edition is available for Linux. If you need Oracle Enterprise Edition features (table partitioning, object support, advanced replication, parallel server), then you need Solaris.

4. Scalability. If you expect rapid growth in you database application, Sun will scale better than any current Pentium system (E10000 anyone?). Beowulf clustering is not a viable option for Oracle.

5. Solaris has journaled file system and logical volume manager (Veritas), and it will suport raw logical volumes for datafiles.

6. If you plan to use an Oracle application, like Oracle Financials, you can't use Linux, because no Oracle application is certified for Linux yet. Oracle Financials is a BIG pain. It is extremely sensitive to the particular Oracle rdbms release, patch level, application patches, OS release, and OS patches.

Note that these considerations have more to do with the current state of Oracle on Linux, and current Pentium hardware limits, than with Linux per se. Ask this question again a year from now, and I hope to give you a different answer than today's.

Meanwhile, you might still get the Linux foot in the door by starting off using Oracle on Linux for test and development. The good news is, if you do use Oracle on Linux and you find you've outgrown that Pentium, you can easily port your entire database to another Oracle system (Sun, HP, IBM, etc.)

There are glitches

I have installed Oracle for Linux and used it for some fairly grand things. I wouldn't use it again for a little while, however. Once things are right it's okay.

But, it's REALLY finicky. The install program itself would random crash every now and then with odd scripting errors that were never repeatable. You could re-run it immediately after and blow by the same point even though you haven't changed a thing.

The original Oracle for Linux CD came with almost completely non-shared libraries which means most executables, such as tnsping and svrmgr were 3-4 meg apiece. The re-linking process itself was a nightmare. I had tons of problems relinking executables which eventually came down to what I believe was a GNU linker or binutils bug but it could've been the library they distributed.

The documentation for Linux is not awful but not grand either. Documentation for other platforms is significantly better.

For awhile I would have trouble shutting down the database. It would refuse to shutdown with a 'shutdown immediate' even though there were no connections nor any rollback activity. Nothing short of a shutdown force would shut it down. This eventually went away for some unknown reason.

The listener would occasionally core dump for little to no reason (that I could see anyway) under light load.


However, mind you it was pretty damn fast and purred well once things got hammered out. The biggest problem I think is they really rushed to package the thing and just tested it to see that most things work.


And some advice. Don't go anywhere NEAR Oracle Application Server for Linux. Particularly, their piece-o-crap Apache module.. (used to make Apache the web listener).


StickBoy

Summary of Points....

OK, I've read everyone's posts, and am going to summarize the arguments here, plus include my own short opinion/experience.

1. Oracle/NT sucks - the universal experience is that NT isn't ready to run a serious production DB. My personal experience with both Oracle (in a test env.) and MSSQL 6.5/7.0 (in production) verify this.
2. Oracle is more stable on Solaris than Linux - there is some debate about this. Oracle is indeed originally written on Solaris/SPARC; however, the Linux port is by far the easiest to do (from a friend at Oracle who works on Oracle/Linux). The deciding factor here is probably simple longevity. The longer something is publicly available to beat on, the more confidence I have in it's stability. Edge goes to Solaris.
3. SPARC vs Intel - Oracle/Linux is Intel-only right now. I've repeatedly asked all Oracle reps and developers I know when Oracle/Linux AXP or SPARC will be out. No time guess at all . The problem with PC hardware (and, to a lesser extent, the SPARC ATX motherboards) is that commodity hardware sucks. It fails all over the place (from a production point of view). So, you can't buy cheap Intel stuff. A good DB server from IBM or Compaq (with the support contract, and Linux support) will run $10-20k at least. Sun hardware (Ultra 10, UE 450) starts at $10k and runs to $50k real fast. Still, Sun hardware fails at a far lower rate than PC hardware. Call it the simple law of combinations.
4. Intel vs. SPARC (scalability) - SPARC hardware scales far better than Intel hardware. Period. If you look at the raw CPU numbers, Intel can be more than competative in CPU vs. CPU, but that's only part of the equation. The memory/bus architecture of a Sparc is far superior to even a high-end Intel box. Much greater Memory to CPU bandwidth, bigger backplane, etc. A DB server will stress virtually your entire system, so a balanced system design is much more important. Though Oracle 8 is still 32bit (and thus can't use more than 4GB of ram per instance), you can run multiple instances of Oracle per SPARC box, and can cram far more memory into a SPARC. Also, right now Linux has a 4GB limit on Intel (acutally, if you tune it, a 3GB usable). Most SPARCs can stuff well over 4GB of ram in them - you can't get more than 1GB in an Intel box unless you pay for Xeons. (which, by the way, eliminate most of Intel's price advantage).
5. Linux vs. Solaris - from an OS point of view, which is better for Oracle? Oracle itself does smooth out alot of the differences (Oracle Linux can do raw volumes). Linux runs faster on less hardware than Solaris. As usual, though, Linux isn't really tested on the Big Iron stuff (I'm not sure it's quite as good on a 8-way box as it is on a 4-way box). Solaris scales virtually linearly (up to 64-CPUs). As previously mentioned, about the only other relevant point is total memory: you get 3GB usable in Linux, and lots more in Solaris. Also, the availability of a superior filesystem/software volume manager for Solaris is not to be underestimated (they really make a difference). The rest of the OS issues are religious, and reasonably irrelevant (or, at least, sufficiently ignorable).
6. Oracle Support? - this is a valid concern. While I highly doubt Oracle will suddenly jump off the Linux bandwagon (though, it would certainly abandon Linux before Solaris, at least in the next 10 years), there is a more crutial problem: support. Yes, Oracle is mostly a self-contained env, so an Oracle DBA should be able to run/maintain Oracle on any platform. However, there are ALWAYS platform-specific dependencies. There are hordes more Oracle/Solaris DBAs, and more importantly, Oracle support itself is extremely familiar with Solaris. I'm not sure if they can even (really) deal with Linux-specific support calls yet. Oracle support is simply far more mature, available, and accessible for Solaris than for Linux.
7. Oracle App availability - if you plan to use any of the suite of various Oracle Apps, many (if not most) are not yet available for Linux. There are a huge number being ported (since the work isn't terribly difficult), but others (like the Financial Suite) aren't, since people haven't demanded it yet. So, if any of these are a concern, Linux/Oracle loses right now. Check back on this is 6 months, though.

I'm looking at your original post, and the main advantage of Linux over Solaris is price. Intel hardware (even the quite heavy-duty stuff you should buy for a serious DB server) is less than equivalent SPARC hardware. However, there are other concerns:

• For this use, your Oracle license will dominate in cost. There is no difference between an Linux and Solaris license cost. The Oracle license is going to dominate your hardware costs (I'm looking to spend $100k for Oracle and $50k on Hardware for something similar to what you describe). So, the hardware savings looks less relevant.
• Like I mentioned before, you really have to spend alot of money to get quality hardware. Otherwise, there's no sense in buying Oracle. Why would you put a 450cc big-block in a VW? Same principle here. I simply can't seen it being a sane choice to run Oracle on anything less than a high-end Dual P2/3 or Xeon with major RAID. $15k minimum for that. More like $25k for a good setup. $50k for a quad Xeon. A stocked UE 250 runs under $35k. A mid-range UE450 runs $60k.

  If you are running a small database (ie, 2-3GB max) that doesn't get hit extremely hard, Linux is certainly fine. However, given that you seem to be wanting a enterprise-level solution, Solaris is simply the better way to go. You might spend 25% more on the hardware, but remember, TCO is so much more than just the hardware. In the long run, Solaris is the much better choice from a feature set, performance/scalability, and support/maintenace viewpoint.

  Hopefully, in about 2 years, we can redo this comparison, and Linux will be a truly equal competitor. Right now, Linux really doesn't belong in the datacenter running hard-core enterprise apps. Soon, though.

  -Erik

Different spin on your question ...

Different spin on your question ...

60% OF ORACLE SERVERS ARE NOW SHIPPING WITH LINUX!

Why? Because M$ does not allow top-tier vendors to bundle Oracle with Windows NT servers. This is designed so end-users are forced to go with M$ SQL Server. But the actual result is that the strategy is backfiring along a different path, people are chosing Linux over NT.

I mean, if you are a Dell, IBM, Compaq or HP customer, what would you choose?

• An NT server with Oracle SQL post-installed by either a 3rd party or yourself, unsupported by the OEM?
• Or a Linux server with Oracle SQL pre-installed with vendor support?

The same goes for the other non-M$ DB players, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM, etc...

Trust me, Oracle SQL Server on Linux is MUCH, MORE STABLE than NT! Against, Solaris, that is a completely different question (especially since it scales much higher). But for a workgroup/mid-enterprise server, I'd say you cannot got wrong with Linux.

Don't be surprise when Linux outsells NT PRE-INSTALLED on servers this year.

Think on it

I've never used Oracle on any platform but HP/UX, but let me inject a few general observations about Unixes and third party products in general:

Keep your critical systems away from anybody's first releases.

Keep your critical systems off of NT.

There are many fine *nixes out there, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Linux is a fine *nix, but it has too many under-informed zealots that will tell you it's always the OS for the job at hand. It's not always that OS. In sheer years, it is way too young to offer the kind of feature set a more mature *nix might offer (of course it's also too young to offer the entrenched corporate philosophies and 10 years of backwards bug compatibility found in a more mature *nix :)

In short, don't count Linux out, but don't automatically decide to use it because a bunch of Internet 12 year olds tell you it "rool3s". Linux does rule for the home PC, or for the ISP, but it's missing so many basic elements, like LVM, RAID, and a slew of things in the process and memory management department... all these things are in active development (yes, even LVM) but once again... do you want beta software a the box that makes your beeper go off if it goes down?
Keep your eye on Oracle for Linux, though. It's a comer and I hope to be using it within a year :)

--Sync

Scalability would make sun a clear choice.

If your firm had the $$, and most do then Solaris 2.x would be a superior choice for a LARGE system.
you will find a lot more people with solaris sysadmin experience with large solaris systems.

On the other hand if the database is a small one (1G) than a linux machine would be sufficent.

Just think why you choose linux instead of solaris in the first place. is it because linux is 'cool' and flavor of the month ? or is it for cost reasons ?

Try not to pick something just because it will be 'fun' and 'cool' to say you are working on it.

Another question you should ask is what other machines the site has expierence with, because you will probably costing them more on support than what you would save implementing on linux.

I am not saying that linux is bad, just make sure you choose it for the right reasons