As Published In July/August 2004

Oracle Walks the Walk
By David A. Kelly

When Oracle believes in something, it commits to it. Not in a laissez-faire, "I'll support it if you support it" way but in a fundamental, down-to-the-core, long-term commitment that takes years to undo if it's wrong. Case in point: Oracle's infrastructure for the thousands of developers working on Oracle applications, Oracle Database, and other Oracle products.

"Late in 2003, we moved more than 5,000 applications developers and our entire applications development infrastructure to Linux," says Jamshed Patel, senior director of the Linux Program Office at Oracle Corporation. It's a grid-based model, where developers are granted a slice of computing in terms of size as well as the amount of time, based on their development requirements. "Today the applications division at Oracle is running its entire development infrastructure on Linux—it's probably the largest software development team running on Linux anywhere. We're able to deploy a very large number of application developers as a hosted model on a grid of Linux servers, so we've significantly lowered our development costs."

That's no small or temporary commitment. "It takes us years to make such a decision to switch," says Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux Engineering at Oracle. "That shows our long-term commitment—it will be at least 10 years or so before we would consider switching again. It's a huge investment, because we have to acquire all the servers and we have to make sure that all the tools we used to use are now on Linux and still run really well. So, if customers are wondering if it's just a marketing thing that we can switch any day, well, this shows we can't. We are really saying that Linux is here to stay."

But, like most other Linux implementations, Oracle's has done more than lower costs. "Our developers tend to be more productive, because we're deploying on low-cost, commodity infrastructure. We upgrade the infrastructure more frequently, and the developers are able to run their tests faster," says Patel. Conversely, increasing developer productivity comes not only from having resources run faster and respond more quickly but also from using Linux to increase reliability and availability. "Because developers are accessing shared resources instead of individual machines, they have much higher reliability in terms of system uptime. They have access to these resources 24/7, and the availability of the development resources has gone up. The net result is that our developers tend to be a lot more productive in this new environment."

The process has worked so well that Oracle is now transitioning its database and application server product teams to Linux as well. This means that, starting with Oracle 10g Release 2, the entire database development team will be developing on Linux, adding 3,000+ developers.

For Oracle, switching all its developers to Linux is not about great publicity but about lower cost, higher productivity, and something that directly affects the potential quality of everything it sells. "Switching to Linux is good for the Oracle product, because we have hundreds of QA machines and build servers running 24/7, doing Oracle regression testing, running all the Oracle tests we've ever built, running massive I/O loads on hundreds of machines, nonstop," says Coekaerts. "If there are memory leaks or weird bugs that we didn't run into before, we'll catch them now."