[Glastonbury] Newbie to Glastonbury LUG

[Sean Miller]

> That's OK. Rants are interesting :) [Oracle Apps server is at 11 by the
> way :) ]

Oracle Apps Server is 9i, will be 10g by the end of the year (the 10g
launch was at Leicester Square Odeon approx. 2 weeks ago)

The Oracle Applications Suite (ie. the Oracle financials application,
Oracle Call Centre etc. etc.) are the ones that go under the moniker of
11i which is why (I suspect) they have switched from the "i" suffix on the
RDBMS/Apps Server products (which stood for "internet") and moved to "g"
(which stands for "grid" as in "grid computing" ("Real Application
Clusters" etc.))

> In this scenario, the "mass market" won't move easily.  It'll take a
> couple of years more of viruses or of real software price rises that
> hurt before many people would consider moving at all. Businesses, on the
> other hand, may move quickly especially if licence costs are expensive.
> [Why bother with Oracle when you can have MySQL / postgresql?]

Where do you want me to start? ;-)

Yes, but I see your point. I don't think the enterprise user is going to
necessarily switch from Oracle to MySQL; at least not until MySQL evolves
quite a lot more, though it is moving in the right direction. SMEs
certainly can now be a target for the LAMP framework, especially on a
three-tier architecture where the product's lack of stored procedures need
not necessarily be a big problem (ie. business logic middle tier, MySQL
used as nothing more than a datastore).

The resiliance of 9iAS running on a RAC architecture is really something
to behold. The way you can "plug in" and remove machines is pretty
impressive -- I attended a demonstration of a website running of a 5
machine Real Application Cluster, and they were showing graphs of how the
server performance suffered as more and more users started using it
concurrently. When it started to groan (at something like 500,000
concurrent users if I remember right) they switched on the 9iAS "Edge Side
Includes" which is a rather clever form of caching, and it immediately
improved. At 1,000,000 users it started to suffer a bit agin, so they
simply plugged an extra box in. Voila! Problem solved... they then decided
to switch off two boxes (as if, say, there had been a power cut in one of
the datacentres)... not one of the users noticed the difference, apart
from the obvious degrading of performance.

This is pretty impressive stuff. For a growing organisation the RAC
concept is exciting because it allows one to start small and gradually
scale the infrastructure as required. For too long the corporate
architecture has tended to be large servers which, on a regular basis,
have been thrown out and a larger server purchased etc. -- with Oracle 9i
RAC (and 10g from December) it is not necessary to do this, the same thing
being possible with an Intel-based cluster of x86 Linux boxes.

> See above and mailing list archives passim.  RH is (relatively) easy to
> install but not necessarily quite so straightforward to upgrade.  Horses
> for courses - there are choices in distributions :)  Upgrading via the
> RH Network could cost at one stage, at least for more than one machine:
> I'm not sure where the updates may come from now.

Martin's assertion that RH have now become focused on the enterprise is
probably fairly true -- their deal with Oracle now means that 9iAS/RHEL is
a combination that will be supported within a single licence. In my
history with Oracle the number of times that I've been bounced between
Oracle and the hardware manufacturers trying to ascertain what caused a
problem with the database or applications... the idea of calling one
support desk and saying "You get on with it and bicker amongst yourselves"
is quite appealing.

I am not, however, as convinced that Red Hat are about to give up on the
domestic consumer altogether -- the rise of IBM in the Linux "playing
field"  is likely to have an impact on their enterprise business,
especially amongst customers who already use IBM mainframe technology. If
I were RH I would at least keep my foot in the door of the smaller user,
as this marketplaces changes so fast.

And let's not mention SCO :-(

Sean