The organization I work for is considering different platforms for its major database, which is almost certainly going to be Oracle 9i. Right now mgmt. is leaning towards either Solaris, HP/UX, or Win2K. I was wondering if anyone has any experience running Oracle on Linux. I guess they say not many people do it and there isn't a lot of collective experience for help out there as there is with, for example, Apache on Linux. I was surprised to hear that opinion from a coworker, since both Oracle and Linux have been around for a while. You'd think a lot of people would have used the combination by now.

Ethan

Oracle only recently started supporting Linux. The 8i install went without a hitch for me and it has been running without any problems for over a year now. I do not have any performance numbers, but I know Oracle is *tested* much more under Solaris. I would be VERY interested to see a direct Solaris vs. Linux Oracle comparision (although comparable hardware configs might be tough to get) - anyone have one?

--jeremy

I have run an Oracle 8i (8.1.7) and a 9i (9.2.0) side by side on my Red Hat Linux 7.3 machine here with out any problems, after i got the install to actually work, 9i installed much easier then 8i, but I did get them both going.

Oracle now supports the OS, as long as its Red Hat, possibly onle Advanced Server, in addition to their software, and i do know of a few datacenters, one quite large one, running Oracle 8i on Linux.

However, in my personal opinion, Solaris is a much better choice for a deployment of an Oracle database then Linux is, it has a good solid 64-bit kernel, and better support, from Sun of course. Linux makes a great test platform for your application/database, but personally I would push for deployment to be done on Solaris or another commercial Unix. Just my thoughts.

Oracle does now support support for Oracle on Linux; however, I would lean towards Solaris as the production platform. For starters, Oracle on Linux is a relatively new combination while it has been running on Solaris for years. Oracle and Sun have a great partneship for making sure that things run well. In addition, their are other things to consider such as redundancy, failover, backups, connections to a SANS, etc. In a very large database configuration, there's nothing like Sun's Dynamic Reconfiguration. You might also run into support problems for other DB related things such as third party tools. While some companies are just now producing first revs of their products, others still have not even discovered Linux or don't consider it worth developing a version for.

Oracle embraces linux at the moment,and also advises to use linux (clusters) for huge Oracle databases..