[rt-users] RT vs. Oracle: what are the issues?

[David Boulton]

We have installed RT (2-0-15 on Solaris 8 and MySQL) for demo purposes, and I've gotten buy-in to now actually use it "for real" (in a limited way).

We are a heavily Oracle shop here. Many of our other product group's stuff sits on top of Oracle. Many of the local IT applications are Oracle. The RT installation docs scared me off of trying to use Oracle, warning of unnamed known difficulties that others had encountered. I installed MySQL just to be on the safe side on my sandbox installation.

The RT/MySQL system seems to have performance problems. (Slow searches at seemingly random times. Slow display of tickets with longer histories). Could this be some sort of pilot error in my installation? Or have I underestimated the size of the machine I will need to run RT effectively? (The current box is quite dinky -- a Sun Ultra 5 -- but there is only one, or at most two concurrent users).

I would probably be better off regarding local politics if I choose Oracle for the production installation. It will also be easier to get DBA assistance. So the obvious question is, what sort of trouble am I going to get into if I do? Are there known incompatibilities? Instabilities? Does the Oracle version matter much? Are there tricks to making it work successfully?

Personally, I'm agnostic, but I'm always in favor of making my life easier. I would appreciate comments from anyone who is actually using an RT over Oracle installation.

Thanks,
Dave Boulton

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david.boulton at openwave.com