Re: Migrating to Oracle on Windows

On Sun, 20 May 2007 11:04:06 +0200, Frank van Bortel wrote:

> Why else would you go to Windows?

Because Windows are, contrary to the popular belief, superior to Linux in many aspects. One of the things Windows does far better then Linux is I/O. On Linux, SCSI drivers are an emulation used to access things like ATAPI DVD burners. That means an interrupt more for every SCSI disk access on Linux which slows things down. Also, NTFS can do both direct and async I/O and can be used in a cluster. It's far superior to Ext3. Linux, on the other hand, has better memory management, primarily because of MS idiotic refusal to implement shared memory and the usual IPC primitives. The thread architecture of Windows means that the only way that that two tasks have to share access to the same part of memory is to run within the same process, as tasks. In that case, they share the entire address space and their combined address space cannot exceed 4GB (32 bit).

On Windows, your SGA size is limited by the OS architecture, but synchronization mechanisms are quite a bit cheaper. Mutexes are not implemented as a separate device and are quite a bit faster then semaphores. For a small database, with very few users, Windows will probably be faster then Linux.

I'm a long time Unix user, having started with now forgotten Ultrix and having worked with a large variety of exotic Unix varieties like Wyse Unix, Irix or Bosix (Groupe Bull), I am very disappointed with the quality of Linux. I am a Red Hat user since the version 5 and I am using Linux because Unix-like operating systems are more familiar to me then Windows, but I have no illusions about the quality of Linux. Unfortunately, overall quality of Windows isn't much better, either.

Unix, on the other hand, is an ancient OS, in desperate need of a thorough overhaul. SUN realized that and their Solaris is a significant departure from the accepted Unix standards. Unix still can only return 8 bits as a status code, Unix still doesn't have record management system and a lock manager, Unix still doesn't have but a rudimentary system of privileges and access control, Unix still doesn't do per process I/O accounting and has sorely inadequate monitoring tool. It doesn't take a genius to recognize the importance of the question "which process is responsible for the most of I/O", but it is impossible to answer that question using only standard monitoring tools on Unix.
OS religious wars are totally besides the point and are now more a part of the hip hop culture then a part of debate among professionals. I am a part of R&R generation, not hip hop, I have no objections to someone using Windows. It's an OS, neither better nor worse then the other ones for the same platform. If you want X11 server and Perl, there is always Cygwin.

-- 
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