There's a heated discussion on the suse-oracle mailing list. People
there are biased (of course ;). But here's what an Oracle employee
posted to the list:
FWIW, bet it's a personal preference. Until a while ago I thought that
Redhat was better, but after doing a few SuSE installs with 8.1.6,
8.1.7 and
iAS, I must say, SuSE is a super optimized platform, my choice now for
installing and using Oracle. Oh, that's the 7.0 version, the 7.1 and 7.2
(which is being mentioned here) I haven't had the chane to use yet.
Here's what Michael Hasenstein posted. He works for Suse and is
the techie for the Oracle stuff.
Because of recent developments at Oracle I have a very easy time
convincing people to use SuSE. I can drop any attempts based on
technical merrits, which is kind of tiring after a while, and instead
say:
You guys don't have an alternative!
SuSE Linux is the porting platform for 9i. RedHat pulled out at Oracle
and don't have anyone doing any certifications beginning of this year.
So far RedHat 6.0 got all certs automatically as 8i porting platform,
but a) this is very, very old anb b) it's lost now that we have that
advantage and c) not even redhat sold that version any more so thay
never gained anything from it except for the marketing value.
Larry Ellison will showcase 9i this month in the US and in Europe, and
he'll have just one operating system (besides the machine and 9i) with
him. Guess which one...
So, I've stopped trying to convince people to try SuSE. I'm quite happy
when they use RedHat. As soon as they want to go production and call
Oracle they'll find out. For 8i that's not yet much of a problem because
except for Apps 11i, where we're the only certified ones, and iAS 9i,
where it's going to be us and Turbo (so far only RH 6.0 is certified as
porting platform), RedHat is still certified.
And even if they should come back to Oracle, we've got a big edge now.
We've been at Oracle with onsite engineering help a) as the first ones,
and b) as the ONLY ones with no interruptions. Actually, apart from
Turbo there's never been anyone else with a continuous presence there
from the Linux guys anyway.
I don't think the above falls under any NDA and should be a secret. I
believe it's not SuSE's fault the others don't show that much of an
Oracle commitment, and more important, users have a RIGHT to know in
order to make their choice.
Well, take it with a grain of salt.
