What are the support ramifications of choosing to run a Production
Oracle
8.1.7 database on Debian GNU/Linux rather than Red Hat or some
other x86 Linux distribution?
I personally
strongly
prefer
Debian over Red Hat (or any other rpm based distribution for that
matter), and I know that Oracle will work just fine on
Debian.
But I also know that sooner or later, I'm going to get some
weird Oracle error and have to open a TAR with Oracle for support.
(I'm pretty sure that the only usefull way to interpret "Oracle
internal error" trace files is to send them to Oracle, and I've seen
that before.)
So what I'm concerned about, is when I do need to get support from
Oracle, is the Linux distribution I'm using going to cause me trouble?
Does it make any difference technically? Nontechnically? Does Oracle
care?
Oracle's online
Certify
tool and this
recent
PDF summary
both basically show "certified" status for Red Hat releases through
7.1, and SuSE through 7.2, plus some other random distributions.
Debian isn't mentioned at all.
But just what does it mean when Oracle "certifies" a particular Oracle
product / OS combination? What ramifications, if any, does it have
when you need to go to Oracle for support? I wasn't able to find any
hard info on this on Oracle's websites or elsewhere, and am very much
interested in your experiences...