Re: O/S Choice for Database Servers
- From: Andrew Kerber <andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: cicciuxdba@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:39:03 -0600
Well, the issue I have with windows is the overhead. I have to agree that a
well managed Windows server will run just as well as a well managed Linux
server, but there are more wasted resources on windows server, especially
Memory. It takes a lot of RAM and CPU just to run the Windows environment
that is not required for Linux/Unix.
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Guillermo Alan Bort
<cicciuxdba@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> Niall,
>
> You make good points and talk from a logical point of view. I talk from
> my experience alone, and it may very well be that I ran into crappy windows
> administrators and good unix administrators, but overall stability of the
> system has been always better on unix than on windows as far as my personal
> experience goes. This has biased me against windows as a server OS.
>
> On the other hand, I have similar experiences with HP-UX and have had
> more than enough problem with AIX, as well as some weird reactions from the
> CRS on linux. On the other hand, as it is far less common for people to be
> familiar with Unix and hardcore unix admins are usually very curious people,
> they tend to be better at their job. Again, this is my personal experience.
>
> And here I bring you to MS SQL Server. In itself it's not a bad RDBMS,
> it's actually quiet good, however it's amazing how many SQL Servers you find
> out there that are not properly configured and maintained. Now, I've found a
> few Oracle dbs like that, but far less than SQL Servers o MySQL (which I
> must admit have little to no experience with).
>
> I understand where your rant comes from, this kind of bias against an OS
> is uncharacteristic of this list, but please, try to understand where the
> bias comes from...
>
> Oh, and btw, the fact that Oracle released a patch for RedHat speaks to
> the openness of RedHat and not to the compatibility of Windows.
>
> cheers
> Alan.-
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 6:15 PM, Niall Litchfield <
> niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> subject changed so I can rant. This is my response to the recent thread
>> about how to install Oracle in a Windows environment. I've changed the
>> thread because I think that the main points were answered before we got
>> here. What we then saw was a surprising (for this list) attribution of
>> unevidenced or ill thought out suggestions about using Windows as a server
>> O/S for Oracle Databases:
>>
>> <rant>
>>
>> - Windows platform is not fully compatible with Oracle products so
>> these problems always appear.
>>
>> Really? As opposed to RedHat Linux where Oracle have gone to the bother of
>> a kernel patch for the o/s itself. Every major version of Windows has had
>> the current or next release of the database certified on it sharpish.
>> Similarly look at the certification speed for Oracle E-Business on windows
>> compared to (say AIX).
>>
>> - If your production servers are installed at windows platform ,You
>> shouldn't let them to join windows Domain at installation phases, as this
>> is
>> a wrong decision for running time performance.
>> You should use a Workgroup or primary DNS suffix which allow you to
>> avoid such problems you may face at joining windows Domain.
>>
>> Again a statement with no evidence presented. In general AD does a good
>> job of policy and security management and certainly a better job than
>> managing an estate of Windows servers one at a time. If you haven't got your
>> dns management right and tied into the domain (which the latter suggests,
>> then you haven't got AD setup correctly)
>>
>>
>> - Clusterware was installed with a domain account. That proved to be a
>> fatal mistake when this particular domain the account belonged to was shut
>> down as part of a migration project. After a scheduled reboot Clusterware
>> wouldn't start at all. End of the story was a complete rebuild of the
>> environment using local administrator accounts.
>>
>> The fatal mistake here would seem to be not correctly identifying the
>> dependencies in the migration project.
>>
>>
>> - Windows is just play box it is never for server installation if you
>> are using oracle,db2 (I do not whether db2 is avaialble on windows) kind
>> of
>> big databases.
>>
>> I must remember to tell that to the ten billion dollar a year
>> manufacturing operation that run their multi-terabyte SAP datawarehouse on
>> Windows. :)
>>
>>
>> - Oh, and when you have to do maintenance on a DB on a Windows server
>> and the IT Security department tells you NOT to log in to ANY server using
>> your AD account because there's a virus in the network and we need to
>> contain it..
>>
>> What has the AD account got to do with this scenario - it makes no
>> dfference to virus propagation if you log in as local Admin or a domain
>> account with admin rights to the rights inherited by the executable code on
>> your machine.
>>
>> - . and when they have to reboot a production DB server to apply a
>> hotfix (which happens a lot more often than unix patches)
>>
>> - run up2date on your Linux box and count the number of updates released -
>> it *will* surprise you. Because Linux admins don't update their servers for
>> known security holes in general, and windows admins do is not really a great
>> argument for frequency of patches.
>>
>> - or when they need to reboot the DB server because it's been up more
>> than 90 days straight... well, that's when you know the platform you've
>> chosen is probably not the wisest choice.
>>
>> nope that's when you know that the admin doesn't understand the platform.
>> I must reboot every 90 days is an admission that something that I don't
>> understand is happening.
>>
>>
>> </rant>
>>
>> I had that <insert name of local controversial fugure> in the back of my
>> cab once :)
>>
>> --
>> Niall Litchfield
>> Oracle DBA
>> http://www.orawin.info
>>
>
>
--
Andrew W. Kerber
'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'
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