Oracle Linux?

eldavojohn writes "There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"

Re:OpenSolaris?

[Doctor Memory]

If they want their own OS, they're probably going to want something that'll support clustering and a fast file system. Currently GPFS [ibm.com] is the top dog in that area, and it's only available (currently) for AIX and Linux. It'd probably make more sense to put effort into improving this than porting it to Solaris.

Agreed that Solaris would provide more enterprise-grade (<—marketing term) features than Linux, although zones are becoming less compelling given the rise of virtualization, and I hear that ZFS doesn't provide the performance boost on SANs that it does on JBODs.

Re:OpenSolaris?

[atbarboz]

I work at Oracle right now - and all base development happens on RHEL 3. We are in fact upgrading all developer and QA machines to RHEL 4 over the next couple of months. Solaris used to be the base development platform around 2 years back, but it's just a porting platform as of today.

Re:Definitely has uses but..

[djbckr]

Uh sorry, but you're wrong on most of your points.

Oracle runs on Red Hat Enterprise or SUSE Enterprise (I might have the names mangled a bit) both with relatively straight-forward settings. Everything is included in the distributions. Yes, Oracle donated some of the code that makes it into those distros.

Furthermore, Oracle provides *full* support for the Linux OS itself when you have a properly licensed copy of Oracle.

Re:Definitely has uses but..

[sqlgeek]

I'm not sure what you're refering to when you talk about "wierd extra things enabled." Here are some reasonable changes you'll want to make to /etc/sysctl.conf

kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
fs.file-max = 65536
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
net.core.rmem_default = 262144
net.core.wmem_default = 262144
net.core.rmem_max = 262144

And then you'll need async i/o.

yum install libaio

The above all taken from HJR -- www.dizwell.com > installation guides
net.core.wmem_max = 262144

Re:Red Hat has no worries with this

[floydman]

" They write software to require the maximum amount of administration and consulting possible."
I am surprised that you are a DBA....had a look at 10G, did you realize how many times you read the word automatic in the release notes , lets count a few:
1) Automatic memory managment , DBA's spent weeks and nights to configure their memory, now its automatic
2) Automatic storage managment, if you have'nt heared about that, then its a nifty piece of SW
3) Automatic segment managment...the name says it all
4) Automatic tablespace maagment
5) automtic DDM
  and the list goes on and on and on

"Companies with deep pockets will buy it because it's Oracle "....No, they will buy it for its reliability...if you are a dba, you will know what i mean, lets talk about block level recovery, flashback, incremental backups, etc,etc, etc, etc....

I can see you are not having fun as a DBA because of the working environment you are in, but Oracle is a different playground...

BTW, because of all these features, oracle is expensive, the closest RDBMS is miles away from its fucntionlity, and invoative ppl (sleep cat and the like, sibel, etc), are bought...and to prove good intentions, Oracle takes over the support of the bought companies, whether sleepycat, peoplesoft, sible, synopsis, what ever..cause they can afford it, and cause they are after ur money...ITS CALLED BUSINESS

Re:OpenSolaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to forget that Oracle has both clustering and a file system already. ASM for the file system and Cluster Ready Services from the RAC product for clustering. All they need is an OS, and I would agree that OpenSolaris would probably be a more mature product in this space than Linux.

Re:Definitely has uses but..

[Doctor Memory]

I would guess that they would offer a complete package that has Oracle running with Linux pre-configured to run Oracle. The idea would be that nothing else would be run on that box, except perhaps for a few utilities the customer run to monitor, backup, etc.

In that case, why go with Linux? I'd think they'd want some kind of a minimal RTOS: a scheduler, demand-paged VM, TCP/IP stack and a simple filesystem. Basically all it's going to do is switch among Oracle threads and a network daemon, and hammer the disk. Why have a complete multiuser environment for running (essentially) an embedded program?

If they provided (or closely specced) the hardware they could even get old-school on it and hand-write assembler code for the critical parts of the disk driver or network stack. Anyone know if Oracle's raw device I/O is faster than a good RAID set-up?