We have Oracle support at work, I forget what level exactly -
something basic. In our case, it was cheap, because we have very few
users of the Oracle database in question. I have only made limited
use of the Oracle support, but so far I've seen
nothing where
they ask you waht distribution of Linux your running. Has anyone else
had Oracle support ask them this?
My guess is that Oracle probably will still give you support
whether your Linux distribution is "certified" or not, but yes, they
maintain their out to use "you're not running Red Hat Advanced Server"
as an out if they can't figure out your problem our don't want to deal
with you. Seriously though, Oracle (8.1.7.4 anyway) mostly
just works. If I remember correctly, our few support requests (TARs)
to Oracle have been submitting the occasional (rare) mysterious Oracle
trace file for them to tell us what the heck it means.
Oh and using Metalink - Metalink is actually very useful, for serious
Oracle work you really need it to look through all the bug reports,
etc. etc., even if you never open a TAR asking for help.
