Oracle on Windows

In all the years that I have worked with both Microsoft and Oracle I have never seen so much interoperability and cooperation. This week Oracle announced support for People Tools on SQL Server 2005. See the announcement at http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2006_jul/peopletools-848.html. This is just one in many examples of how the interoperability between Oracle and Microsoft products is getting better. Other examples include the ability to integrate Oracle logins with Windows Active Directory and the extensive support of Oracle products on Microsoft Windows.

Oracle was the first database software available for the Windows NT platform and was also the first database software available for the 64-bit editions of the Windows platform. Oracle supports not only their database software, including RAC, on Windows, but also People Tools, Oracle eBusiness Suite software, and the Oracle Fusion Middleware products. Oracle even supports Microsoft clustering with Oracle Fail Safe.

Recently a new type of interactivity has started occurring. Oracle Grid Control monitors the Windows OS, but now does much more. Oracle is now providing Grid Control Plug-ins for the following Microsoft products:

• Active Directory
• BizTalk Server
• Commerce Server
• IIS
• Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA)
• Microsoft .NET Framework
• Microsoft SQL Server

These Plug-ins allow Oracle Grid Control to monitor and provide alerting functions, so that in the event of a failure, you will be notified via email, pager, etc. Oracle has expanded Grid Control in order to provide a full service management and monitoring utility.

On the other side of the fence, Microsoft does not explicitly create Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) management packs for non-Microsoft products, but has opened this up to the 3rd party vendors. There are several management packs for Oracle products available today. This allows the extensibility of MOM to be used with Oracle and any OS that you happen to run Oracle on.

This week I happened to be working on my upcoming “SQL Server 2005 Administrator’s Companion” book and was going through the editorial process on replication. With SQL Server 2005 replication, you can replicate data into a SQL Server 2005 database from an Oracle publisher. This allows SQL Server reporting servers and batch servers to get their data directly from Oracle using replication. In addition, it is possible to set up an Oracle subscriber to use a SQL Server publisher, thus using Oracle for reporting and SQL Server for OLTP. It is also possible to perform distributed queries between Oracle and SQL Server databases by configuring the Oracle database as a linked server within SQL Server.

There has always been cooperation between Oracle and Microsoft for using Oracle on the Windows platform, but the management cooperation has just begun. In the next few years you will most likely shop around and decide whether you like the Microsoft tools or the Oracle tools better and then implement that tool throughout your entire enterprise.

# posted by Edward Whalen @ 1:12 PM