I work for an organization which runs Oracle Applications 11i. When we went live in 2005 and decided to host the system on Windows Server 2003. Our Technology Department was attempting to consolidate on a standard operating system. Unfortunately for us, very few shops are running Oracle Applications on Windows. I have been working with Oracle Applications for 10 years and I have only encountered one other Oracle on Windows organization, and it was very small.
On a theoretical level, this may not seem like such a major issue, after all Oracle and Microsoft are both well established technology titans. Oracle releases upgrades and patches for Windows after other operating systems. I am also suspicious of the level of testing on the Windows platform. I have found patches with the "/" character in the wrong direction. This is one of the major syntactical differences between Windows and the UNIX based operating systems. Whenever I see the "/" characterin the wrong direction, I know that the script or program has probably not been run on Windows. Granted, there is a UNIX emulator, but I am still very suspicious.
So we know that Windows and Oracle are not great friends or collaborators. What is especially damning in this case is that we run a special flavor of Windows Server 2003 that was never really backed by Microsoft. We use Intel's 64 bit Itanium processors on our database and this requires a special version of Windows Server 2003. Accroding to the Microsoft SysInternals site, only 12,000 Itaniums were sold in 2006. Microsoft cut bait at this point and never supplied any of the SysInternals tools required to debug and monitor questionable applications, such as our E Business app. So our only short course strategy is to bounce our system every 48 hours. It's almost like the early days of Windows computing. I don't blame MS for this one....well maybe not totally. I actually blame both MS and Oracle for their timeless feud with one another.
Our long term solution is to migrate from Windows to LINUX. While I am a big fan of Microsoft, mixing it with Oracle is a dangerous combination.....lesson learned.
I do wonder if just Oracle on Windows has issues or if Java in general has a difficult time running on a Windows Server. I haven't encountered many Java Jockeys who are big Microsoft fans. I suspect that Java does indeed have issues on Windows servers.
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