back to article Oracle Database 18: Now in downloadable Linux flavour

Oracle Database 18 is now available for on-prem download on Linux, according to a talkative senior Oracle chap. Oracle corporate HQ Oracle: Think our DB sales are great now? Wait until we actually get the new product out... READ MORE Mike Dietrich, Big Red's master product manager for upgrades and migrations, said users can …

  1. JakeMS
    FAIL

    Unknown reasons?

    "The download gets you the zip file but not the rpm. Those may take a couple of weeks for unknown reasons," wrote Dietrich.

    Seriously, unknown reasons?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Unknown reasons?

      "Unknown reasons" is code for "stupid internal process reasons that I really don't want to talk about".

      In other words, we product managers do have a bit of a sense of humor about our own absurdity.

      Anonymous Coward so they don't throw me out of the product managers' Secret Society...

    2. TheVogon

      Re: Unknown reasons?

      Thank you god for SQL Server AAG that means I no longer need anything Oracle.

  2. Korev Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    Thinks: "Oracle 18, how the hell I have missed so many versions"

    Reads further one:

    As we reported last year, Oracle changed its release numbering from version number increments to year-based increments. Hence Oracle Database 18 was previously known as Oracle Database 12.2.0.2.

    Marketing people, why do you insist on doing crap like this? Maybe Bill Hicks had the right idea

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Be thankful they just incremented it a bit more. I once was in a situation where marketing decided the version number be *decreased*.

      Cue tons of actual customer scripts breaking because they concluded they ran on a too old version.

      AC to protect the guilty.

      1. PhilDin

        Upvote for being the only person on the Internet that knows the difference between cue and queue

    2. MotionCompensation

      They found a way around releasing unlucky version 13.

  3. herman

    "The RPM download will take a couple of weeks": Wow, Oracle Linux is that slow?

    1. Androgynous Cow Herd

      Nope

      It takes that long because it is being downloaded from Oracle Cloud.

    2. Jay 2

      If you're using ULN, then yes as ice ages move faster.

  4. Gene Cash Silver badge
    Coat

    deb?

    An rpm but not a deb? Racist bastards!

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: deb?

      And no .txz? Targeting newbs only?

    2. FrankAlphaXII

      Re: deb?

      Yeah, of course because Oracle's preferred version of Linux is a rebrand of RHEL that they'll charge you five times as much for.

  5. Alistair
    Windows

    The RPM will require a couple of weeks because they fired the guy that does cpio, and the two fellas that know how to strip out the redhat branding are having to learn a new talent.

    1. WhenIsTheNextBus?

      that's what happens when you promote the dev to VP

      I wonder how long its been since Wim checked in code ...

  6. asdf

    Long live Windows production servers

    What is really choice about Windows production servers is requiring an antivirus program that somehow gets its its new definitions stuffed up and voila you have a hung 2gig Symantec process you can't kill because it has its hooks deep into the OS. Just reboot it and it will fix it like all Windows problems security guys tell me because if there is one thing you want to do often with production servers is reboot them. Meanwhile my HP-UX server only has been rebooted once in five years for patches scheduled well in advance. For the record I consider Linux closer to Windows server wise than a real UNIX. Linux posix fap motion. ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh fail.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Long live Windows production servers

      Much as I feel your pain I think this is on A/V in general and Symantec in particular rather than Windows. A/V is just a horrible, self-perpetuating solution that gives me the willies architecturally, irrespective of what platform it's on or who provides it. "Oh so you want to hook into every I/O on my system as a privileged user and stay resident in protected memory all day? Well what could be wrong with that?"

      As far as Linux vs. UNIX goes, yes, I would be the first to acknowledge that Real UNIX blew and continues to blow Linux out of the water in many respects (Solaris virtualization is still vastly superior to anything Linux has for example, and live patching on Linux is still immature). But I am reminded of the story of the US colonel meeting General Giap of the Viet Cong at the Paris peace talks to negotiate an end to the Vietnam war:

      Col. Harry G. Summers Jr.: "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield."

      General Giap: "That may be so. But it is also irrelevant."

      1. asdf

        Re: Long live Windows production servers

        You never got me down Ray (me as the bean counters force Linux on me because duh its free). More than half of what makes commercial UNIX better though is the insane quality of the hardware and features they put out as well. PA RISC just keep trucking long after its obsolete.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Long live Windows production servers

          Ah, PA-RISC. A lovely system. But this battle is lost. It's not so much what "makes commercial UNIX better" as what made, past tense, it better - and those advantages (deep talent pool, corporate backing, intensity of focus, knowledgeable customers, dedicated hardware) are no more.

          To whit: All the Solaris talent left Sun/Oracle years ago. Judging from HPE's April 2018 roadmap I imagine HP-UX is supported by three people in a garage who weren't even born when the Superdome and Integrity lines came out. HPE is a shell of its former self and barely seems to know what it is any more. Both Oracle Solaris and HP-UX are running on fumes and all the innovation in their OSes is coming from other communities (eg OpenStack on HP-UX). Customers have their own business imperatives and Linux is good enough for 99% of what they do, plus the talent to run it gets cheaper every year, so "good enough" is fine. Hardware margins are brutal.

          When I retire I fully intend to recreate the computing environment of the late 1990s and have a blast just playing around with all the heyday UNIX systems I can lay my hands on. The UNIX Wars were ridiculous at the time, but with nothing to look forward to but hearing aids and senility, I shall have a blast firing up IRIX and OSF/1 and HP-UX just for the hell of it. But not AIX. Please God no.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Long live Windows production servers

            And in all reality, in the last 20+ years I've never met a situation where a combination of BSD and Linux can't get the job done in big multi-national enterprises. The only major problem has been convincing MoneyBags that FOSS really, really can be just as good (and is in many cases better) than PaidForUnix[tm] or Redmond or Cupertino.

            1. Korev Silver badge

              Re: Long live Windows production servers

              And in all reality, in the last 20+ years I've never met a situation where a combination of BSD and Linux can't get the job done in big multi-national enterprises. The only major problem has been convincing MoneyBags that FOSS really, really can be just as good (and is in many cases better) than PaidForUnix[tm] or Redmond or Cupertino.

              Are there really many industries left where there is still a lot of Unix "big iron"*? I though that most places had moved over to Linux.

              * I realise there are still a few usecases where x86 can't scale far enough; but over time they're growing small.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Long live Windows production servers

            I liked AIX ...... it was different BUT got more and more 'wild/insane' as time passed ;)

            HP/UX and Solaris are fun as well :)

            Digital Unix (Tru64) was also very good.

            [I seemed to have used lots of 'odd' *nixes !!!]

            1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
              Thumb Up

              Re: Long live Windows production servers

              Have an upvote for Tru64.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Betamax

        I like Oracle database (more than I like Oracle licensing) but always preferred DB2 and I liked AIX virtualisation better than Solaris containers but all of them are also rans now. Intel have won the server wars, ARM is their only threat and open source is taking over data centres. We will be kept busy kludging different solutions together for that 5% of use cases that really call out for specialist hardware/OS but can't rely on a single vendor to be around in a decades time (IBM or Oracle as CPU designers).

    3. TheVogon

      Re: Long live Windows production servers

      "What is really choice about Windows production servers is requiring an antivirus program that somehow gets its its new definitions stuffed up and voila you have a hung 2gig Symantec process you can't kill because it has its hooks deep into the OS"

      That's not a problem with Windows that a problem with your AV vendor / your testing and rollout process.

      For reference installing say an Oracle RAC server cluster to a running state on Windows Server is an order of magnitude faster and simpler than on Linux.

      1. asdf

        Re: Long live Windows production servers

        >That's not a problem with Windows that a problem with your AV vendor / your testing and rollout process.

        IE corporate security who gets the last say. News flash many on here might nod their heads at when you are in manufacturing the corporate headquarters IS doesn't always have the 24/7/365 mindset. As for Linux being good enough perhaps but exist in a space where I care 100x more about reliability than performance or latest wiz bang features (yes yes you can go super redundant with Linux and BSD which I would probably be all for in a new non legacy system). The software I am running minus the occasional enhancement hasn't changed in a decade. Luckily corporate is letting me migrate to Itanium HP-UX instead of Linux but even dreading that some. I will also be honest and say we do most of our new development with software running on Windows boxes because it is at least an order of magnitude quicker to develop with. 90%+ of the support calls I do get when its on my side and are general server issues are on the Windows boxes (or corporate network or oracle dbs problems but I digress) though. The future may not be big iron UNIX but hoping it can carry some ways towards retirement at least :P I don't need HPE any more (for at least another 5 to 10 years) really because luckily people there in the past got it right.

      2. LeoP

        Re: Long live Windows production servers

        It is 2018 and if you still roll out Oracle RAC you deserve Windows.

  7. Tim99 Silver badge
    Trollface

    "Oh, and Windows, but cool kids don't use that"

    I suspect that many of the cool kids won’t be using Oracle either...

    1. Ima Ballsy
      Linux

      Re: "Oh, and Windows, but cool kids don't use that"

      Because the COOL and SMART have switched to PostgreSql

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        please!

        EnterpriseDB

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