Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

12 Responses to “Migrate from Windows to Linux. The Stupid Quote of the Day.”

1. 1 Doug Burns January 20, 2007 at 6:09 pm

   I mean nothing important by this – just a simple observation.

   I’ve been quite surprised by just how many of Pythian’s customers, who are predominantly based in North America at the moment, are Linux shops. It seems completely dominant. I’ve no doubt the UK will catch up in time, for better or worse, but I’m afraid we’re still ‘stuck’ with AIX, HP/Ux and Solaris.

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2. 2 Mogens Nørgaard January 21, 2007 at 7:45 am

   In Denmark, where IBM has been very dominant for decades, most companies that are outsourcing to IBM is pursuaded (if that’s the word) to move to AIX and the Power-architecture. I’ve been in meetings with other outsourcers where they’ve told the customers in rather certain terms what their preferred OS is, and how much expertise and love they can pour into that IFF the customer choose it. But of course they have (in)complete freedom to choose whatever they want.

   So I’d expect the Linux choice of your company’s customers to simply reflect a Linux-culture within Pythian :).

   Mogens

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3. 3 Yavor Ivanov January 22, 2007 at 8:57 am

   Here, in Bulgaria, I see 2 kinds of shops: Normal (you may call them small, with IT Budget up to hudred thousant euro per year) and Bigger (call them Medium).
   In the bigger shops, the decision is made outside Bulgaria. It can be HP UX, AIX, Solaris or Windows. I rarely see Linux on Bigger shop.
   The Normal shops work with Windows or Linux. And when I go there as an consultant and they ask me “What would you recomend: Oracle on Windows or Oracle on Linux?” my answer is always “Oracle on Linux, only if you have Linux guru in IT department”. Usualy they have none.
   The fact is, Oracle on Linux is more stable only if you have enough linux knowledge. And this is where the strength of MS is. Every shop, absolutely every one have MS gurus. And Oracle on Windows is more stable on that case.
   This is where the technology meets the reality.

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4. 4 Alex Gorbachev January 23, 2007 at 1:38 am

   “I’ve been quite surprised by just how many of Pythian’s customers, who are predominantly based in North America at the moment, are Linux shops.”

   Hold it Doug… Wasn’t it just few hours ago that we took over a customer that’s running Tru64 and, get this, OpenVMS! And even cluster OpenVMS!
   Two other major customers are running Solaris and AIX. Well, one of them has Linux in the pipeline indeed but be sure – not under their remote DBA influence. 😉

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5. 5 Doug Burns January 23, 2007 at 2:49 am

   So I’d expect the Linux choice of your company’s customers to simply reflect a Linux-culture within Pythian :).

   I doubt it! I don’t know the history of course, but it looks to me like Pythian normally just pick up what their customers are using. I don’t think they have either the industry power or internal culture of an IBM 😉 In fairness, most of the customers I’ve looked at *so far* have been Internet sites, so I suspect it’s really popular in that particular sector. As I move on to other teams, I’m seeing a bit more AIX and Solaris, but still a minority so far.

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6. 6 Doug Burns January 23, 2007 at 5:10 am

   Ha! I left my comment when yours hadn’t been approved yet 😉 and I forgot to mention the VMS!

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7. 7 Paul Vallee January 23, 2007 at 9:24 pm

   I agree that we definitely don’t have the ability, now would we wish to under most circumstances, to dictate the operating system platform to our customers. We sometimes have the opportunity to recommend! 🙂

   That being said, we do have a lot of experience with Linux. Our earliest adopter among our customers first ran the original 8.0.5 port from Solaris in 1999. We’ve been running Oracle on Linux continuously since then.

   Paul

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8. 8 evilensky November 27, 2014 at 11:48 am

   Seven years later, I wonder how those deployment numbers stack up. Also what AWS deployment revenue looks like.

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   • 9 kevinclosson November 28, 2014 at 12:45 pm

     Yeah, wordpress resurrected this old post because I updated the post metadata…

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9. 10 John Thomas November 27, 2014 at 4:20 pm

   Oracle Support utilities available for Oracle RAC on Linux:

   ORAchk
   TFAcollector
   OSWbb
   runcluvfy.sh

   I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. ORAchk is a 180KB bash shell script. Cygwin might run it successfully on Windows but it seems unlikely Oracle would put much effort into supporting it on Windows.

   Of course Oracle on Windows is supported, and always will be while there are significant numbers of customers on it. But without major support tools available, what does “Support” mean?

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   • 11 kevinclosson November 28, 2014 at 12:46 pm

     Good points … old post.

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     • 12 John Thomas November 28, 2014 at 1:21 pm

       Yes, just realised how old! Maybe I found it in a Google search, but I thought I came across it because it popped into my inbox…

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