Let me tell you, they don’t have it much better. If you are expected to be surrounded by happy smiling Oracle applications holding hands in Windowsville on Oracle11g you may have a surprise. My first wakeup call in Windowsville came at the end of the OUI Install phase when the local DBCA refused to hook up with the instance when it was trying to make a move on the DBControl install. Two SRs (am I going to see a repeat of Linuxville? Will I have to move to Solariston?) later I had something like a working instance. Definitely not a marriage made in heaven let me tell you. Eventually we had to go in by the back door using a set of jimmies and the scripts I coerced DBCA to create. After manually finagling in some passwords and killing the zombie instance we had unwittingly created (note: A direct jolt from DBCA failed to kill it, I had to pull a knife trick with SQLPLUS and DROP DATABASE) I got a working instance running, however, I’m afraid dbcontrol/console or whatever alias it is using this week was still DOA he would get right to the point of climbing off the table, clutch his heart and fall over with a bad security certificate and a failure to connect, RIP.

So right now I’ve pulled out my handy Benchmark Factory Swiss army knife and am currently putting the instance through its tricks on some hard hitting TPCC tests. It breezed through a 20 user test, so I upped the anti to 100 users. Once I determine if this instance is just stringing me along waiting to spring some odd errors and failures or is the least bit stable, mayby I’ll spring some Real Application Testing on it. I’ll follow that up with a little SQL Replay action. I’ll keep you posted. 

Remember I am still on the 32 bit side of the tracks with only 1 gigabyte to my name so I am pushing the limits here. Maybe if I get some more stake money I’ll move over to the 64 bit side of Windowsville with some serious gig.