[olug] Oracle and CentOS

[Christopher Cashell]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Jay Swackhamer <Jay at reboottheuser.com> wrote:
> Is anyone running Oracle on CentOS, and have any issues with Oracle support?
>
> 1. ((oracle && centos) && support=ok)
> 2. ((oracle && centos) && support=problem)

As I understand it, Oracle considers a database system "supported" if,
and only if, there is current vendor support for all parts of the
system.  Specifically, that includes hardware, storage, and the
operating system.

If you run Oracle on CentOS and run into issues, and Oracle Support
finds out you're running on CentOS, you could quite possibly get hung
out to dry on it (whether you actually do will probably depend heavily
on the specific Oracle support engineer, and how likely the problem is
with the DB vs. the OS).  At my previous job, we made heavy use of
CentOS for a lot of stuff, but our production Oracle servers had RHEL
on them "just in case" it ever came up on an Oracle Support issue.
Oracle ran just fine on CentOS for our dev/test servers, though.

Personally, I'm a fan of PostgreSQL, and use it heavily.  In those
cases where PostgreSQL can't handle it, and something like Oracle is
needed, the whole system cost (server hardware, storage, Oracle
license, etc) is usually high enough that throwing an extra thousand
bucks a year at a RHEL license is a drop in the bucket.

> --
> Jay Swackhamer

-- 
Christopher