Saturday, July 16

Summer time is maintenance time

Upgrades
People are on vacation and system usage is quite low, perfect for some upgrades!
I took the opportunity to upgrade our last 8i databases, we are officially (almost) 8i free. There is one old Sun box running 8.1.7 system in India that no one really cares about, it holds a quite big database of historical data and has perhaps 2 logins per month.
The lowest production release we have now is 9.2.0.4 which I plan to upgrade to 9.2.0.6 sometime in the coming weeks.
A few old RedHat 2.1/9 systems also got upgraded to RHEL4 or CentOS 4 (yes, sick and tired of paying RedHat the big dosh for terrible "support").
The older Solaris systems keeps ticking with old release that are still fully supported by Sun without any hassle or weird comments from the support, we should use Solaris more.

Oracle CPU licensing policies
I browsed through the Oracle price list and noticed that multi-core CPU's are charged higher than single core. My position is that one CPU is one socket and I think most companies agree with me, but not Oracle :(
fortunately for us single CPU systems with multiple cores are treated as 1 CPU when running SE/SE One, but on larger systems you have to multiply the number of cores with 0.75 to get the number of CPU licenses to purchase. Takes some of the glory from the upcoming v80z from Sun, a four CPU system with dual-cores will be charged as a six CPU box, meaning about $80k extra cost!
This is not cool, Oracle needs to re-think this!

1 comment:

Tani said...

When your system is ideal or you are away it is a perfect time for upgrade. In India mostly people go on holidays in summer time thus it is the best time for maintenance.

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