Re: help with site+database
On Wed, 18 Jul 2001 13:25, Peter Billson wrote:
> > Oracle will do the trick, but the installation on linux seems so fragile:
>
> My experience with Oracle has been great under Linux. I have a
> client that is running a couple of beefy Dell Poweredge servers (2-zenon
> 1Ghz chips, 2Gb memory, 300Gb RAID array, etc.) with multiple, very
> large (30+ million records) Oracle databases with hundreds of users on
> each that have been bulletproof.
> The customer is so satisfied that they are migrating some more of
> their NT/2000 installs to Linux.
> Older kernels (2.2x) that didn't support large files, lots of memory
> and SMP well didn't do so well but the 2.4.x series has addressed all of
> those issues. RedHat's 6.2EE series applied a lot of the 2.4
> modifications to the 2.2 series kernel and worked very well with
> Oracle... RedHat, Dell and Oracle even supported this combination!
Your experience has been much better than mine.
Does Oracle ship RPM's for Red Hat?
A few months ago I tried installing Oracle on a Debian system, I didn't even
want Oracle itself, I only wanted the client libraries for talking to an
Oracle server and the software development kit. So I wanted the libraries,
Perl libraries, and the SQL interpreter.
There were no tarballs, RPM, or Deb packages, so I had to run the install
program. It was an ELF format executable that gave a strange error message.
Stracing it showed that it was trying to run a shell script that ran a java
program which then ran another ELF binary!!! I spent a few days trying to
track down what was going on (and hack in extra environment variables to the
scripts etc). I encountered a number of problems including inexplicable
failures if I used native threads through Java (Green threads worked).
When installing Oracle on Solaris it's a lot easier because the versions of
shared libraries and the behaviour of Java is fixed and the crap code Oracle
writes has more chance of working.
The Oracle installation software is written by some really stupid people. It
has plenty of moving X widgets etc to show that the installation is in
progress, but in terms of real features it is seriously lacking.
The installation and maintenance of Oracle is a tricky thing. Oracle
consultants are also very expensive (and generally not excessively skillful
in my experience). For these reasons I'd recommend Postgres over Oracle for
serious applications.
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