Having discovered that it’s now easy to create polls, I find that it’s a little addictive.
There have been requests for help going all the way back to 7.3 fairly recently on the OTN database forum, so I thought I’d set up a poll to see which versions people had in production. If I’ve got it right you’ll be able to mark multiple choices from the list.
For reasons I don’t understand the order of the version selection is being randomised every time the screen refreshes. (The results show, as required, in the order “newest version first”).
Seems odd that 11.2 usage exceeds that of 11.1 given that 11.2 has not been out long and has had no major patch releases. 11.1 has been around for a few years and has been through quite a few patch releases.
How ‘production’ are these systems? Are folk considering personal notebook databases production?
Comment by Kirk Brocas — September 2, 2010 @ 3:00 am UTC Sep 2,2010 |
Well, in my experience, it goes like this:
1. If a new project is started, the most current release at the time is used as deadlines are more important than future upgrade headaches and besides, it is Development who decides, not Support.
2. For existing installations Support decides, and so people upgrade at the last possible moment (just before end of support of their current release). At this point, the new Release 2 is out. Combined with the common belief (Oracle marketing calls it a myth and tries hard to dispel it) that (any) Release 1 is not suitable for production use, and with the fact that Release 2 will be supported longer than Release 1 you get what you see in the poll.
Comment by Flado — September 2, 2010 @ 7:26 am UTC Sep 2,2010 |
Hello Kirk,
round about 40 % of the databases, that i take care of are database for SAP systems.
SAP certifies only XX.2 releases and i am migrating most of the database to 11g R2 right now.
Why? The main reason is advanced compression (OLTP compression).
All the migrations itself worked fine and i didn’t notice any problems right now.
Regards
Stefan
Comment by Stefan — September 5, 2010 @ 10:02 am UTC Sep 5,2010 |
According to my reckoning 11.1 has had precisely 1 patch release (not counting CPU/PSU) 11.1.0.7 and that is the terminal release for 11.1. In addition many folks skip the initial release – see the usage of 9.0 and 10.1 in comparison to 10.2 and 9.2 (and even 8.1) – in favour of the first point release. So I’m not hugely suprised by the stats, though the survey is of course not statistically valid. Oracle Corp periodically produce a slide that shows volume of support calls by version which is also an interesting proxy for market share of each version.
Comment by Niall Litchfield — September 2, 2010 @ 7:17 am UTC Sep 2,2010 |
Niall,
I was trying to think of arguments that supported, or undermined, the statistical validity of this little poll. Although (to my mind) the size makes it suspect, I can see that my subscribers come from all over the world and from all sorts of companies – so the sampling method could be valid. I can imagine that users of (say) SAP or Peoplesoft wouldn’t be regular readers of the blog so there is a “skew by absence” that might be significant but I can’t think of any other skewing effects.
On the other hand, Oracle support figures would, presumably, only be about clients that were being supported – which would give them a bias towards the newer versions and latest point releases.
Comment by Jonathan Lewis — September 6, 2010 @ 8:17 am UTC Sep 6,2010 |
I think there is a similar bias here, as only fairly with-it people are even going to come here. I speculate there is a large pool of older sites that are just in maintenance mode, with no one to even take such a poll. Perhaps we get an insight into those sites when sometimes we see a newbie on a forum ask a certain set of questions – something has happened and “the computer guy” is thrown at it, or someone finally decided to upgrade some hardware and they are trying to copy Oracle over as though it were SS. Over time, stable core applications don’t get as much notice as hot new things.
Comment by joel garry — September 7, 2010 @ 5:38 pm UTC Sep 7,2010 |
Jonathan,
Well of course your poll now has a significantly larger sample size than it did when I left my comment (I think there were about 460 or so responses at that point). And Kirk’s observation is now invalid as a result of the later responses! (currently 11.2 and 11.1 are tied on exactly 144 responses each). I could speculate about how representative of Oracle customers readers of your blog are (my suspicion is that there would be a bias, though probably small, towards customers using newer releases and doing more advanced things with the database, and certainly a bias towards English speaking customers though I wouldn’t expect this latter to matter that much for this poll).
I do still think that your poll provides fairly strong evidence that people prefer terminal releases (It might be interesting to see 8.1.x broken down into 8.1.7 and earlier), I also suspect we can say as well that 10.2 is the most popular release currently – I don’t know that we’d be able to distinguish between 11.1,11.2 and 9.2 for second place.
Thanks for providing the poll though, there are worse addictions to have of course so if you felt you just *had* to do another one, then that would be interesting too.
Comment by Niall Litchfield — September 6, 2010 @ 10:16 am UTC Sep 6,2010 |
Hey fellas. I understand why SAP certify against the .2 releases, the .1 releases are pretty dodgy historically and they are not supported as long as the .2 releases. I think “Beta” is the word that goes with XX.1
However if I HAD to run 11g in production, which I DO have to now – I took over a site going live on 11.1.0.6 – I’d pick the 11.1.0.7.x releases over 11.2.0.1 any day.
11.2 just hasn’t been out long enough. 11.1 has been out for a couple of years and has been heavily patched. 11.2.0.1 was released some where around the 11.1.0.7.0 patch level – i.e. 11.2.0.1 had fixes for bugs discovered and patched in 11.1 up to about 11.1.0.7.0.
As Niall says, many folks skip the initial (.1) release and wait for .2. I thought however that most of those wait for at least a couple of patch set updates before even thinking about putting that in production.
If you look at 9.2.0.1, 10.2.0.1, even though they were XX.2 releases, they were horrible and not production ready until around 9.2.0.[5,6] 10.2.0.[3,4]
11.1.0.6 with one-off patches I found terrible (corruptions, ORA-600s galore, hangs) until 11.1.0.7.[1,2..]
So I guess I am surprised by the use of 11.2 in production given it seems quite a new beast in comparison to 11.1, and I imagine there will be a tonne of patches on the way.
And yes, thanks for the Poll, a good chance for a healthy debate
Comment by Kirk Brocas — September 6, 2010 @ 10:15 pm UTC Sep 6,2010 |