[ale] Suse vs. Ubuntu. Is is worth the time to switch to ubuntu?

[Sid Lane]

I'm not disagreeing w/you nor am I encouraging people to run Oracle on
non-certified distros/versions (though I have w/o issue before) - you just
happened to touch a nerve w/me (Oracle "support").  to be somewhat fair, I
don't see how you could possibly get competent Oracle people to do support -
Larry couldn't pay me enough (or at least he certainly wouldn't be willing
to offer what it would take).

I've had my share of pain w/Dell too but thank goodness I don't have to
handle my own hardware anymore (or at least rarely).

we've also had several vendors that are RHAS only and won't even support
SLES.

finally, I don't think Oracle is anywhere near M$'s level of evil - they
don't require activation keys or "genuine advantage" to patch, they aren't
jumping on the frivolous patent bandwagon (though potentially at their own
peril), they put out comparatively little FUD, their core product actually
IS the best at what it does (even if expensive) and as a bonus has never
been used to launch a massive DOS attack against the internet.

full disclosure:  my wife worked at Oracle for almost 10 years (apps
presales) but this gave me an insight into that company most customers never
get.

my bottom line:  they are arrogant, but not evil (at least not in the M$
sense)...

On 8/1/07, Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com> wrote:
>
>  For most folks that know what they're doing calling support is usually an
> act of desperation (or worse yet a matter of policy because the powers that
> be can't stand paying for support if you're not calling ? this was a
> maddening fact of life at a prior job).   Usually one has to do some major
> escalation because front line support for everyone assumes the callers are
> morons (and having once done support for customer sites I can tell you that
> about 75% of the time they are).
>
>
>
> You're final sentence, however, seems to make the point I was making ? you
> use a distro that Oracle has "certified" so you have the opportunity to make
> the call and not immediately get laughed off the phone.
>
>
>
> Also while my example was Oracle I did note that there are several other
> commercial products that are only "certified" on these "commercial" distros.
>
>
>
> Not being a DBA I will say that the few calls I've made to Oracle about
> our RHEL systems running RAC and Mobile Lite were much more productive than
> similar calls to Dell for Linux support.   On the flip side the number one
> annoyance I have about Oracle (and all DBMS companies) is they always assume
> the issue is the OS first and the DB last ? our DBAs always look at the 15
> possible causes of any given issue and seize on the last one that says "or
> it may be a disk or OS issue" and ignore all the DB specific troubleshooting
> steps suggested.
>
>
>
> I'm not a huge fan of Oracle but will say that it did scale up at a prior
> job in a way that Sybase would not.   My major knock against Oracle now is
> that having gotten the DB tier and the application tier (Oracle EBusiness)
> they now want to have the OS itself (Unbreakable Linux).   They haven't
> quite reached the M$ level of evil in my mind yet but they're not far from
> it.
>
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