Installfest and Downsizing…

Installfest

Tod Trichler from OTN sent me a mail this morning about a new Installfest section on the Oracle Wiki. I’m always a bit dubious about putting links to my content on the Oracle Wiki because it seems like a shameless plug, but this section of the Wiki actively encourages it, provided the links are relevant. If you are into Oracle on Linux try and get involved. 🙂

Downsizing

As part of our continuing assimilation a whole bunch of projects at work are being downsized at the moment. Many will run in a limited capacity before being shut down completely in the near future. As a result, I’m in the process of moving several databases from large, expensive and power hungry hardware to commodity hardware running Linux. In a couple of cases, applications are moving from RAC to single node databases.

It’s quite good fun installing loads of little boxes and transferring the data. Sometimes, having lots of little jobs to tick off the list is quite rewarding, although I’m sure it will get very old very fast. 🙂

While sitting running some Red Hat updates I found myself saying, “I love Linux!”, to a colleague. I can’t tell you exactly why. It just has the right combination of ease of use and geek appeal all rolled into one. I work with Oracle a variety of platforms (Tru64, Windows, Linux) here, an I’ve used a whole bunch more in previous jobs, but I think Linux ticks most of the boxes for me.

Cheers

Tim…