Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

MySQL created a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculator showing how cheap MySQL is compared to Microsoft MSSQL and Sybase. Interestingly, the parent company Oracle remains out of this picture. I find that sad. Why not be open and let the customer decide? Either way, the savings of MySQL Enterprise Edition to MSSQL are shocking: MySQL TCO Savings Calculator . Add your grain of salt...

Like many others, we are running into issues with Oracle licensing. Oracle charges a lot for its software and using state-of-the-art hardware you may even end up paying more, rather than less. The thing is, Oracle refuses to see VMware virtualization as "hard partitioned" but instead as "soft partitioned". That is, a single core VM may run on all cores that are available to it. So Oracle licensing requires you to factor in every core. Oracle's own Oracle VM (OVM) for x86 and SPARC (Xen-based) uses hard partitioning, but this comes at the cost of loss of overcommitment. That is, you cannot assign more cores than you have and increase the CPU utilization of your hosts. This is not necessarily bad, but means you can run less VMs on a given host. Reference: Oracle Storage Guy and Weinshenker.net

Oracle has released an update to Unbreakable Linux, shortly after Red Hat released RHEL 5 update 5. Oracle's Linux portal ULN should have OEL5.5 available by now. Oracle's Linux OEL is downloadable by anyone, provided you register first. Only updates cost money.

I've been diving a bit into the RAM configuration of our new R710 Dell servers. They have new memory configuration settings. "Memory Optimized" mode can yield a 50% performance improvement at no cost other than to place DIMMs in appropriate slots. Dell has a white paper detailing the options a bit more: Optimizing DDR3 Memory Settings in New 11th-Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers . It also lists trade-offs of choosing one configuration over the other or when to go for a balanced intermediate.

Network World : "Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday. The code helps maintain 'comprehensive data integrity' as information 'moves from application to database, and from [the] Linux operating system to disk storage,' according to a statement. It also lowers the possibility that erroneous data will get written to disk. The companies' effort is meant to help data-center administrators track and address corrupted data quickly, lowering costs and downtime"

ZDnet reports the Oracle is going high profile at the Linuxworld conference , positioning it as a world league player for Enterprise Linux... :yawn: But it made an interesting announcement : the introduction of the Oracle VM Template , pre-configured software stacks designed to reduce installation, configuration and maintenance costs by eliminating the need to install and test from the ground up. Always a big time saver, so I'm definitely going to look into this. Hope I can convert the Xen VMs to VMware format, but I think so.

" Oracle Validated Configurations are pre-tested, validated architectures with software, hardware, storage, and networking components with included documented best practices for deployment. Oracle and its strategic partners offer and recommend these configurations to enable end-users to deploy fully tested solutions to achieve standardization with high performance, scalability, and reliability while lowering infrastructure costs."

Today, Oracle announced a new TPC-C benchmark result on an HP ProLiant ML350 with the best ever price/performance. This result sets a world record in the price/performance category, which measures the cost per transaction of the configuration benchmarked. It demonstrates that Oracle Database not only provides customers with a highly performant and scalable data management solution, but can also deliver unparalleled cost savings with record-breaking performance on HP ProLiant systems, ideally suited to small and medium sized businesses (SMB). Achieving 100,926 transactions per minute with a price/performance of $.78/tpmC, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One delivered 45 percent more performance at 14 percent less cost than its nearest competitor. To set this new TPC-C price performance record, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One was run on an HP ProLiant ML350 server with one Intel Quad-Core Xeon 2.6 GHz processor and HP StorageWorks arrays. The operating s...

Oracle Validated Configurations are pre-tested, validated architectures with software, hardware, storage, and networking components with included documented best practices for deployment. Oracle and its strategic partners offer and recommend these configurations to enable end-users to deploy fully tested solutions to achieve standardization with high performance, scalability, and reliability while lowering infrastructure costs. Oracle works together with all major hardware manufacturers on creating these configurations. HP, Dell, EMC, Emulex, QLogic and many more.

Last week, Oracle announced new prices for its Standard Edition products. Bottom-line? Cost is lowered upto 87% compared to the previous situation for Standard Edition and Standard Edition One running 2 or 4 CPU machines! As it turns out, prices have been lowered since Febuari 16th... thanks for telling, NOT! The move seems a responds to Microsoft's lowered prices and the arrival of multicore CPUs.