Why still use old versions of Oracle??

Question

Hi All,
I was just wondering what are some reasons why organizations continue to use older versions of Oracle like 7 and 8i when we are now at version 11g?
I would love to hear what everyone has to say.
Thanks,
JrOraDBA

Answer 1

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Mogens Norgaard (Oracle Insights) says that most users only need version
7.3 and that advances since then are for the UPS's and eBays of this world.
Disagree. Totally.
Oracle OPS cannot be compared to Oracle RAC. 7.3's partition views cannot be compared to
proper partitioning. And then what about features such as FGAC, rman, ASM, Apex, materialised
views - just to mention a few?I readily accept that Oracle is a good deal more sophisticated now than it was in
version 7. I think that Norgaard - a man with no axe to grind with Oracle and who
is a highly respected Oracle database practitioner - is talking about an "average Joe Sixpack
run-of-the-mill OLTP system".
Why do you think he made this point -
"Most customers really only need Oracle version 7.3 with respect to features"? (p 92 of the book).
All of these we use. In production. For 24x7 corporate mission critical systems. It would be
laughable to suggest that these could run on Oracle 7 and provide as a robust, flexible,
performant and scalable solution as using 10g or 11g.I accept this also - it's just that Norgaard is saying that "most" customers don't need
Oracle after 7.3.
I would tend to agree - in particular, the (totally free) functionality available
from, say, PostgreSQL and/or Firebird gives you more than this.
Open Source databases? Even more laughable. There is no way that these can compare
to Oracle. Not when doing intensive processing. Not when needing scalability, availability
and redundancy.Look [url http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/application-server-benchmark-proves-postgresql-is-the-best-enterprise-database-server-new-specjappserver2004-cost-metric-introduced-too/]here and in particular at the post of Clemens Eisserer
Open source databases have come on in leaps and bounds in recent
years and represent a value for money solution in many cases where
an Oracle licence would be prohibitive.
I have a SE database on a small 2 CPU server that at this very moment is dealing
with up to 12,000 rows inserted every second into a single table.. after which that table
(an hour later containing around 40 million rows) is processed. You want me to believe
that an Open Source database can do the same? Then you will need to prove that cause
I don't think for a single moment that Open Source databases like mySQL, PostgreSQL
and Firebird are anywhere as capable and able as Oracle.Also, take a look at VoltDB - an Open Source high-performance database from
Michael Stonebraker - SQL and ACID in a novel new design.
There are "Lies, damned lies, statistics" and then* there are database benchmarks.
How big are your rows? I'm running Hammerora at the moment against an Oracle 10
XE instance and I'm getting Y no. of rows (I don't think that I'm allowed release any benchmarking
that I do "into the wild") inserted/second - how meaningful is that? What is the disk setup?
[url http://www.ib-aid.com/articles/item104]See here you have a very thorough
benchmark with inserts of 24K rows/sec into a Firebird database.
Table 3: Loading operations Description Value Time to load
~70 hours
Total records inserted
6.2 billions
Average insertion speed
24500 records/second
Average record size
146 bytes (min 13 bytes, max – 600 bytes)
Transactions
646489I don't want to get into a religious war here ;) - particularly since this forum is hosted by
Oracle - I was just trying to explain to the OP why certain customers aren't interested in
the latest "bells and whistles" version of Oracle - 1 reason is that powerful software
is available for free elsewhere - although in terms of features, Oracle does have
the honour of the "kitchen-sink" implementation with a rich feature-set.
Paul...