Oracle Delivers 10g Release 2 on Solaris for X64

Published: April 20, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With tens of thousands of joint customers, Oracle and Sun Microsystems are dependent on each other and have been since Unix became a popular computing platform in the data center a decade and a half ago. While Oracle was more dependent on Sun iron in the early years, with many viable alternatives to Solaris on the market--mainly AIX and HP-UX, but also Linux and maybe Windows if you are feeling generous--it can be safely said that the tables have been turned and Sun needs Oracle more than Oracle needs Sun.

Still, Sun and Oracle have tens of thousands of joint customers, and Sun is determined to either get customers on current UltraSparc-IV or Sparc T1 iron, or move them to Opteron-based "Galaxy" servers. And that means that the implementation of Solaris for the X64 architecture has to be current with other RISC/Unix platforms when it comes to Oracle database support.

This week, Oracle and Sun announced that the 10g Release 2 version of Oracle's cluster-aware relational database has been tweaked to finally run on Solaris for X64 machines.

Oracle 10g was launched in February 2004, and Release 2 was put out in July 2005. Release 2 includes performance tweaks that make clustered databases run more smoothly and efficiently, and also includes scalability tweaks that can increase the number of nodes in a database cluster to over 100 server nodes in a single database image. (Practically speaking, people in the know tell me that eight nodes is the practical upper limit of production clustered 10g databases, so it is unclear how well this super-scalability works just yet.) Release 2 includes features that deliver better load balancing across the cluster, and Oracle has published open up and API in the Clusterware feature of the 10g database (this is the secret sauce that Oracle licensed from Compaq's TruCluster extensions to its Tru64 Unix to create Oracle 9i RAC) that will allow companies to better hook 10g databases into their high availability clustering and management software. The 10g Release 2 database also has beefed up encryption technologies.

Oracle 10g Release 2 shipped initially on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, which spoke volumes about where Oracle's focus is these days. If this were 1996 or 2000, it would have been on Solaris first, regardless of the chip architecture. Oracle then rolled out support for Enterprise Linux 4, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris 10 on Sparc, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, and Microsoft Windows.

Windows and RISC/Unix boxes got the 10g Release 2 support in September 2005, and this January, Sun and Oracle made a big deal about renewing their long-standing partnership and getting Release 2 certified on the X64 variant of Solaris. There's a good reason for this. Sun says that of the portion of its installed server base that runs database software (as opposed to infrastructure workloads), 85 percent of these machines use an Oracle database. If Sun wants to stop customers from jumping to Linux or Windows on X64 iron, it needs to have Solaris on X64 support. And it needs to be current with Linux when Release 3 comes out, too.

Back in January, Sun also offered a special Sun Fire Sparc server bundle with Oracle 10g that basically gave customers the database for free for the first year. So far, Sun hasn't offered this deal on its Galaxy machines, but now that Release 2 is available, now might be a good time.

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