Hi,
On 31 Oct 2014, at 5:26 pm, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
And yes, you can install Oracle on non Oracle stack, but you won't get any support for Oracle [by Oracle] on Linux UNLESS it is 100% using Oracle's stack.
This is absolutely not true: Oracle RDBMS (as an example of one of our products) is fully certified on Oracle Linux, RHEL, SUSE, Windows, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX on various hardware including Intel, SPARC, and PPC. You get exactly the same level of support across all of the certified platforms. The benefit of running RDBMS on Oracle Linux is that your support request can be fully handled by Oracle.
As an Oracle DBA of many years, I've come to the conclusion that I don't really want to support Oracle any longer. The way they took over Sun, well not happy about that. They way they still take issue with Google over Java API with Android ... not good either. The way that MySql test scripts are now [unless it has changed again], not part of MySql open source....
It's interesting you say that about Sun, because from Oracle's perspective, we've finally made the hardware division profitable (something Sun wasn't actually able to do). Our Engineered Systems (Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics, Virtual Compute Appliance, SPARC SuperCluster, Big Data Appliance and others) are fantastic examples of the sheer power of having hardware and software fully integrated by a single vendor. The new SPARC M7 chip was only possible by combining the RDBMS team with our hardware designers so that we could create a chip that could offload RDBMS functions into silicon. And the flip side is the MySQL has gotten exponentially better since we bought Sun, with releases being fully tested and certified prior to release. The OpenJDK has become fully open and the reference JDK completely. VirtualBox is fantastic. We've ported Dtrace to Linux. We keep improving btrfs and OCFS2 in mainline. We've brought significant improvements to NFS (particularly our mainline work on pNFS and NFS over RDMA). We did a lot of the IPv6 work for NFS too. As I've said before, the Oracle mainline kernel developers have little to do with Oracle Linux the product: they're paid to improve Linux in mainline and we have another team that builds and tests the UEK. One of the motivations behind releasing the UEK is to be closer to mainline to get the benefits of our ongoing work on enterprise Linux capability. Essentially, our former Sun customers as told to me anecdotally at OpenWorld this year and last year have all said that while they were very worried about the acquisition, the truth is that for enterprise customers, they're getting far more now with Oracle than they did in the last years of Sun. Obviously, YMMV. :) Cheers, Avi