Ok, possibly naive on my part, but Jeff doesn't seem to quite agree with you. hmmm... maybe he hates windows? I don't put words in Jeff's mouth. I figured out that would be a bad idea some, what, 14 years ago... And I'm still curious about the other half: how much influence can be exerted over windows development? Windows, paradoxically is a closed-source/open system. The word "open" is used to describe the interoperability ecosystem. Linux on the other hand is open source/closed system. That is, as long as you have managed to develop code just to give it away for free (tough biz model to get venture cap for), you don't get the kid-gloves treatment in "the community". MSFT, on the other hand, has APIs and qualification programs and as long as you play by the rules, you get kid-gloves treatment from "the community". Windows may be more stable than in the past, but it still has warts. * drive letters There are solutions for this, guess where. It is possible to have tens of dozens of LUNs as mointpoints under a single drive with *certain solutions*...or simply concat and stripe LUNs and make a single 16TB filesystem with a drive letter and have, what, 24 or so of those? * very non-scriptfriendly commands agreed, but this is the viewpoint of a Unix-oriented person. The original thread touched on the notion that a 100% windows shop (e.g., zero Unix/Linux expertise) would be more likely to succeed if they ware to try to cramb in a seat-of-the-pants learning curve Unix/Linux system. * the shell sucks Solutions for that too, but again, might not suck to "windows people" * services cannot be counted on to start reliably on reboot Bug or architecture issue? Bug likely. And there once again, there are solutions for that too. I know I'm sounding argumentative, but I'm not trying to be. I just want to keep cutting back to the original supposition that started this thread, which was that 100% windows shops would be better off crambing in a Linux system for Oracle. Now, all that aside, I still think Oracle on Windows is a REALLY bad fit, but that is not so much a Windows problem in my assessment. Opinions are free... -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l