UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have been planning to set up a Unix workstation at home to host an Oracle database just for database admin. practice. But I don't know enough about hardware to know whether this can be done on a regular desktop and the required hardware config. If anyone could kindly guide me in this mission I would be forever grateful. Thank you in advance.

Peace.
Tman.

Hi tmanpakdee,
The short answer is yes, you can do it.
I won't go into to much detail because that would take all day but you can install Linux on a standard PC. I run mine on a P133 with 128 MB of RAM. Nothing fancy by todays standards. Oracle, as well as many other DBs, can be installed on Linux. Depending on what kind of environment you want you will want to have more memory and disk. Linux runs pretty well with few resources, Oracle on the other hand will need a significant amount of memory to run efficently. Even with a 128 MB RAM + Swap + several GB of disk, you can run Oracle at home with no problem.

TioTony

Hi UncleTony.
Thank you for your advice. I guess I will go ahead with it then. Would you happen to know anything about partitioning to have say two operating systems on the same machine? I'm thinking about having more than one db system on it. Maybe Oracle and SQL Server. Or can i do both on Unix?

Respectfully,
Toneman

Well, if you wanted to run SQLServer (I am assuming Microsoft SQLServer), you could dual-boot, but keep in mind you would not be able to run them at the same time, generally speaking. Normally, when you dual boot, you are working with one OS, or the other. There are certain solutions (I think VMWare could do something like this), but keeping costs, details, and simplicity in mind, it's probably not the best solution.

If you accepted beforehand that you could only work with one at a time, it could be a very viable solution... Also, you could run multiple Unix SQL databases on the same machine at once (MySql, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc...) without having to reboot to switch operating systems, although you would take somewhat of a performance hit running so much at once... Yet another twist on the latter option would be to have the databases set up, just turn each one on as you use it, and off again when you're done.

Lots of choices!

Or, if it is more important that you learn SQLServer and Oracle rather than SQLServer and Oracle on Unix, install Oracle for NT on your NT box and forget about unix.