Alpha, Itanium, VMS and Oracle

[Jlienema]

Hello,
I am considering the purchase of an Itanium system moving off Alpha's. I will be running VMS 8.3 and moving to Oracle 10. The question is-- we want to maintain testing on the Alpha's but have production on the Integrity is that possible or would you have to recompile every time you moved between the systems? Also will dataguard work between the systems?

Thanks Julie

[Volker Halle]

Julie,

moving from Alpha to Itanium requires re-compile and re-link. If you use the same versions of compilers, database software etc. on both systems, chances are high, that everything will work the same.

Volker.

[Karl Rohwedder]

I would suggest buying a small Itanium box (rx1620 or rx2620) for development to rule out any compiler... differences when trying to lcoate errors.

regards Kalle

[Peter Zeiszler]

I agree with Karl - obtain a small rx1620 for compiling and testing. We are doing that exact thing. We will be supporting alot of alphas for awhile as we migrate to the itanium so we have one small rx2620 just to compile and final check out the product on itanium before going to production.

The chance of an issue compiling on itaniunm is small but our biggest advantage will be less risk of an impact to production.

[Ian Miller.]

Hopefully you have seen the Techwise whitepaper on moving to Integrity

http://www.openvms.org/stories.php?story=07/05/09/6253921

Your test system should be the same architecture as your production systems. A rx1620 or rx2620 or similar would be good.

[Brad McCusker]

Hello Julie,

>we want to maintain testing on the Alpha's
>but have production on the Integrity i

You would also need to have development on the Integrity because there are no (publicly available) Alpha/Integrity cross compilers.

I concur with prior posts - purchase a small development/test machine.

You might be interested in reviewing the OpenVMS Alpha to Integrity Transition Modules located here: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/integrity/transition/modules.html

Brad McCusker

Software Concepts International
www.sciinc.com

[Camiel]

Julie,

I think it depends on what exactly is running on the VMS server. Our company has Oracle databases on VMS, but all the programs are on Oracle Application Servers on other platforms. The only custom code running on the VMS machines is in PL/SQL running inside the Oracle database. If your setup is like this, you could probably get away with running your test/development environment on a different platform.

Camiel.