I’ve been following the thread over at Yet Another Oracle DBA Blog about the effort to migrate a very complex Oracle7 database on OpenVMS (old Digital gear) to Oracle10g on Linux. I hope Herod will give some details about the hardware used for the Linux system. It looks like they are about 6 days into the data migration aspect of the project. Here is a snippet of the system being migrated from:
Oracle database version 7, with an astounding 3,319 tables in a single schema with only one primary key constraint created on one table. No database referential integrity at all. 891 procedures, 4319 triggers, 771 functions (no packages).
That sounds like a mess! This would be quite a project for anyone to take on. Give the site a visit and see what you think:
http://yaodba.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-project-time-for-new-job.html
http://yaodba.blogspot.com/2007/01/conversion-of-07.html
http://yaodba.blogspot.com/2007/01/conversion-of-07-still-processing.html
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
I’m glad I don’t have to write the test plan! 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Kevin ,the way you’ve worded your text makes it sound like OpenVMS is ‘old digital gear’, rather than the particular system in question (I haven’t yet read the referenced article).
OpenVMS is owned by HP, and is an actively maintained platform for Oracle, although releases have been somewhat delayed (thanks to HP rushing the alpha processor retirement, mostly). The operating system itself has just had a major release V8.3 for alpha and itanium platforms, and has up-to-date features, including one of the best behaved SAN implementations I’ve had the pleasure to work with. The HP integrity/itanium platform is certainly very competitive for certain workloads. Among other platforms, I manage VMSclusters supporting thousands of users using very modern kit, so it’s kind of a hot button for me to see copy like this.
That aside, I just discovered your site, and it’s got lots of great info, keep up the good work.
-Tom O’Toole
Tom,
I apologize for any comment that seems to slant VMS. When I say “seems to” that is precisely what I mean. You will never catch me railing on Legacy systems. Never. Hell, I’d still have a Honeywell DPS8 running GCOS with TPS here if I could and I’m not joking. I see you are a new reader. I welcome you. And I also see that you didn’t go and check the referenced article yet. When you do, you’ll find that the “mess” I’m talking about is the very, very difficult task of migrating a very complex Oracle7 database from a non-Unix system to Linux running Oracle10g. That huge technology step is the mess. Read more of my blog and you’ll get a feel for what I stand for. Better yet, read my “About” section at the top of the blog.