Oracle on Linux - opinions ?

Question

I'm after a source of info relating to the pro's and con's of running Oracle 8i on a Linux platform. If anyone can suggest a suitable Website or independant White paper that would be great ! Thanks.

Answer 1

For the record, we support Oracle 8i and Oracle Applications 11i on a number of platforms including Sun, NT/2000, Linux and HP-UX so I have no bones to pick with any vendor (or rather, I have bones to pick with nearly all).
For my money, Sun is hands down the most stable platform for Oracle but you pay up front for not having to pull your hair out, later. In stark contrast, the Linux du jour will be cheap on startup costs but better hope that you aren't paying your dba/system admininstrator by the hour (more, later).
Somewhere in the middle (muddle) is NT/2000 which seems to install fairly easily and provides a GUI interface to almost everything which keeps you from having to know what you are doing, but, NT/2000 seems to hang, inexplicably, from time to time, even on a fresh install, so I could not rate it the most reliable platform. Also, the 8i/Active Directory integration stinks. Better to scrap it and get a real-life LDAP server if you are going to use LDAP for authentication.
Now, to Linux. The problem, here, is complicated. First of all, you have a couple of kernels to choose from (not RedHat/Corel, rather, 2.2.x versus 2.4.x) each of which has strengths and weaknesses. Then, you have what the vendors have done to Linux, which frequently makes it worse. For example, RedHat decided to release 7.0 with a developmental version of the C compiler (2.96) which they probably thought that they could do because they now own Cygnus, but I ended up having to strip it down and build a Linux From Scratch (LFS) system, just so I had some purity.
You could go to RedHat 6.0/6.1/6.2 but then make sure that your Linux box isn't on the Internet because you have enough holes in the OS to walk a flock of cattle through.
To my mind, Oracle should skip the various vendor implementations of Linux and, instead, release a reference implementation on an LFS system. It would be far cleaner and vendor neutral and besides, if you want Oracle you probably don't want most of the garbage that comes from commercial Unix vendors, anyway, so LFS makes sense.
In any event, don't expect the Oracle on Linux install to be easy unless you get the vendor (e.g. RedHat) release, and then you have to deal with the vendor quirks in the OS. If you want a cheap platform, spend a few extra bucks and get 2000/Intel or, get a cheap Sun on eBay and get a near bullet-proof implementation where at least you won't have to worry about whether it is a Service Pack or libc version issue.