SAP running on Oracle

Background:

SAP was implemented at this clients site about 8 years go and back then Oracle was the dominante enterprise database recommended by SAP.

They are running Oracle on a multitude of SAP & 3rd party products including ECC, BW, CRM, SRM, GRC, OpenText & multipul instances of SAP Portal across 8 landscapes. That works out to roughly 80 – 90 instances of Oracle. These Oracle instances run on both Windows Server and Linux (SUSE) operating systems (OS).

in my mind that’s a shite load of cash going to Oracle every year (mainly via SAP license costs).

From what I understand (please correct me if I’m wrong) , Oracle’s licensing model is not the best (for the consumer) as it hasn’t evolved with technology. They charge per CPU Core. So if you have a Quad core CPU, you would need 4 Oracle CPU core licenses.

New Options:

Fast forward to 2011 and there are a number of enterprise level databases out there that SAP will very happily run on.

• Microsoft – SQL Server 
• IBM – DB2 
• Oracle – Oracle Database
• SAP - MaxDB

True to form, the above databases (except SQL Server – Windows only) have been written to run on multipul OS platforms - Windows, Linux, Unix.

Issues:

Since I’ve been working with this client (6 months to date) they have had umpteen issues with the Oracle implementations both running on Windows & Linux.

I went searching through SAP Notes, for the terms Oracle Bugs, SQL Server Bugs & DB2 Bugs, this is what was found:

Oracle:

SQL Server:

DB2:

As you can see, there are a shed load more “bug” related SAP notes for Oracle (1136) compared to SQL Server (484) and DB2 (205).

OK, this might be because Oracle has been around for a bit longer than the other, but more than DOUBLE the number of reported bugs has to mean something!!

The main issue here is that Oracle has given us issues at the wrong times!!
Financial Year End – ECC off-line for over 4 hrs due to an Oracle related issue – That kind of outage during year end usual leads to castration – I mean resignation.

Conclusion:

I think anyone with a finger on the SAP pulse will be able to see that SAP are making rapid movements away from the Oracle DB platform, and it’s going to be interesting to see how many SAP customers start migrating to one of the other providers.

Your thoughts:

I’d love to hear you thoughts, views, experiences and opinions with regards to Oracle within the SAP environment.
I’m probably going to have loads of Oracle DBA’s shooting me down for this article …. so be it.