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Ask Soylent: Is Oracle Linux Support Worth the Money?

posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the support-costs-versus-business-output dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

My organization recently deployed about 60 servers running Oracle Linux. I have worn a few different hats (SW Engineer, Systems Administration, Help Desk) over about 12 years of computing experience, and I have only ever had to use tech support for an Linux OS related problem once, and it was related to converting Red Hat classic subscriptions to the new subscription manager. I have developed software using C, C++, and Python. I have also resolved problems with open source software by downloading the source, fixing bugs, recompiling, and finally submitting the fix upstream.

Other than having someone to yell at, is there any benefit to paying for support? Would be better to just set aside some cash to pay a consultant if there is something I can't figure out myself?

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  • (Score: 2) by TLA on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:51PM

    by TLA (5128) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:51PM (#191638) Journal

    performing an internal risk assessment rather than posting an Ask Soylent? This seems at frst glance to be a no-brainer. If you are not 100% confident in your abilities, then it's better to pay someone else who knows what they're doing rather than face the potentially devastating consequences of a fuck up because you can't handle $random_event.

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  • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:52AM

    by Common Joe (33) <common.joe.0101NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:52AM (#191922) Journal

    He is performing a risk assessment. He's finding out about the Oracle culture and comparing it to his needs / the company's need. It isn't a matter of confidence of abilities.

    And I can't say that I was impressed with Oracle help. The couple of times we needed them, they were underwelming. It took them 4 months to fix a bug so Oracle could vacuum up a standard XML files... a bug that was going to cost us millions of dollars a day. I found a work around by modifying the original XML files and averted disaster. Our DBAs and managers were not happy with Oracle. After all, we were paying them a lot of money for support. In my opinion, we should have just spent the support money (six almost seven figures) to hire several developers and just use PostgreSQL. But I wasn't in charge.