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dgraham-41-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 7, 2011
Question

PDMLink - Oracle vs MS SQL

  • January 7, 2011
  • 20 replies
  • 5964 views
Does anyone have any thoughts on the pros/cons of Oracle vs MS SQL as it
pertains to PDMlink?

David Graham
CAx/PDM Administrator


Emhart Glass Manufacturing Inc.
123 Great Pond Drive | PO Box 220 | Windsor, CT 06095-0220 | USA
Telephone +1 (860) 298 7377 | Telefax +1 (860) 298 7397
Mobile +1 (203) 376-3144 |

20 replies

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GaryMansell12-Amethyst
12-Amethyst
January 12, 2011

I would also be very interested in people's views on this, as Oracle pricing for Virtualised environments makes it extremely expensive compared to MS SQL. We are currently running Oracle but I want to virtualise my Windchill System and it is looking prohibitively expensive if I retain Oracle.

Does MS SQL perform OK?

Do the PTC Helpdesk staff know how to support MS SQL?

Are there many customers running it?

Rgds

Gary

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atwood11-Garnet
11-Garnet
January 12, 2011

Afew of things to consider:

1) With regard to performance, PTC has done a great deal of work on this during the past year in testing and development. Either 9.1M040 with the performance patches or 9.1M050 alone shouldhave similar performance to the Windchill/Oracle combination for most common operations. Some are actually faster in our tests.

2) With regard to support, bear in mind that PTC expects your administrative staff to have SQL Server knowledge and training. SQL Server may be easier to administer in some respects, but it still requires specialized knowledge to get the most out of it, so plan accordingly. At this point there is muchbroader knowledge of Oracle than SQL Server in Tech Support, as you would expect after years of supporting only Oracle. You may wait a bit longer for answers to complex issues.

3) SQL Server 2005 (or 2008 in windchill 10.0) is definitely enterprise-capable, both in terms of reliability and performance. Oracleis more ultimatelyscalable due to RAC at this point, but improvements in processing and disk I/O have made the threshold for transitioning from monolith to cluster on the database sidepretty high these days.

Tim Atwood

PTC Enterprise Deployment Center

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trwjimbo1-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 12, 2011
Depending on the number of databases you run and the number of users you have it may be worth looking at named user licenses from oracle. This is only an option if you require login to view the data, and the login is attached to a specific user, but it may be an option. I have not looked into oracle pricing for a long time so i could not give numbers on how much this would cost, but it makes any future app on new hardware cheeper as you do not have to license that box only the users that connect to it

Sent from my HTC Tilt? 2, a Windows® phone from AT&T
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STEVEG21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
January 12, 2011
I have a bone to pick with the first sentence in #2.

"With regard to support, bear in mind that PTC expects your administrative staff to have SQL Server knowledge and training."

Are you serious!!?? This has been one of my pet peeves since we migrated to PDMLink.

How can PTC create a low maintenance system like Intralink 3.4 and prior versions, then expect people to switch to a system like PDMLink that requires a person, who might not have had the specialized training, get that training just like that? And that is only one part of PDMLink. There are many others areas that training would be of great help.

Leading up to our migration from Intralink 3.3 we were told, or read somewhere, that we could run our implementation ourselves and no specialized training was needed. So much for that...

Steve G
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sdrzewiczewski10-Marble
10-Marble
January 12, 2011
While I understand your concern, when I was in my previous job I saw many
customers make the assumption that they didn't need anybody to 'keep an eye'
on Intralink 3.x. This included nobody doing normal backups etc. Only to
find out later on that when they got a virus on their server, or a disk went
bad that they didn't have any fallback plan and they lost valuable data that
in some cases couldn't be recreated.



If you don't have the capabilities in house to maintain and backup your
databases, you can find many qualified companies to do your maintenance and
backups for you. Any business system that holds this much valuable data
should not be expected to run completely by itself. It's assumptions like
this that get IT personnel fired.



Would you run an ERP system without the proper staff to run it properly? Ask
yourself, how important is all of you engineering data that is in Ilink 3.x,
, Intralink 8.x+, or PDMLink?



Steve D.






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STEVEG21-Topaz I
21-Topaz I
January 12, 2011
Stephen, I agree with you about "keeping an eye on IL".

I guess I don't consider backups as part of the advanced degree and have been doing that since I started with Intralink. I believe it was 1.1. Now with PDMLink our IT staff takes care of the backup and virus issues as you mentioned. That is why I said low maintenance system. We also monitored the space requirements and so forth. Those tasks did not require advance programming skills.

We have an outside company that monitors our PDMLink system. They have done a great job. It just makes me upset that a newer version needs a lot more attention, and advanced programming skills that I do not have, to maintain it. I thought newer versions were supposed to make things easier. Isn't that what PTC is touting going from 9.1 to 10? Easier to install...easier to maintain...easier to this or that. Going from IL 3.3 to PDMLink 9.0 required more and not less.

Steve G
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Cosmo1-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 12, 2011





I could see both sides of this....on one hand, Steve G. went from a "self-contained" implementation of 3.x where you pretty much ran the install script and had Intralink up and running in less than a day without any I.T. experience to PDMLink which as we all know requires a bit more experience in software to admin and has an extra level of complexity. The administration of Windchill is greater than Intralink....no question....but, it's also much more powerful.
Both Intralink and PDMLink should always be backed up of course and THAT is an I.T. function....but I don't think you can always count on I.T. to admin the system from the front end....I.T. in my company only takes care of the hardware side of it and makes sure that it gets backed up. They do nothing else....no performance tuning, no knowledge of SQL, nothing...they do NOT touch Windchill. It is up to us in Engineering to admin everything from the front end of the application.....mainly because we did this when we had Intralink. There is a big disconnect in the middle.
Most companies that used Intralink would have to hire someone new to admin PDMLink.....because the complexity of it and the level/time required to do so is more and frankly not a lot of engineers have the background required.
One option is to go to cloud computing.....use NetIdeas to host your environment for you. It's not super cheap but it's a lot less headache. It'll let you focus on the front end stuff only. They make sure the servers are up and running and performance is great.
I'm actually a little surprised that PTC hasn't jumped all over this "cloud" hosting business. In this day and age, cloud computing seems to be a huge sell and having web-based solutions like Windchill.....this is a very distinct competitive advantage.
Mike -


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BenLoosli23-Emerald III
23-Emerald III
January 12, 2011
Having lived through a Intralink 3.x system upgrade to PDMlink7, I can say that the level of support required for the 2 systems is vastly different.
With Intralink, as long as you understood the basics of backup for the file server and database server, you were OK. With Windchill, the complexity of the relationships makes it harder to, but not impossible, to get your backups right.
However, the running of Intralink and the time required for administrative work was much less than Windchill requires. Oracle under Intralink was there and was usually tuned OOTB to give you decent performance. Oracle with Windchill requires tuning to make it work in an acceptable manner. Not all people have an in-depth knowledge of Oracle to do this. PTC does have some tools and scripts that can be run against Oracle that they will analyze and give you back some tuning recommendations. With PTCs admitted lack of SQLserver knowledge, the advanced tuning feedback will be harder to get from PTC.

With Intralink, PTC 'sold' you a complete package for managing your CAD data.
With Windchill, you are getting a kit that needs assembly.

Thank you,

Ben H. Loosli
USEC, INC.
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VivekPhadnis1-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 13, 2011
We are evaluating the option of using VMWARE as a platform for Windchill
production server. The redundancy and failover options are some of the
things we are looking for.

We have confirmed the support from PTC Tech Support

Can you please reply if you are using VMWARE or have any experience with
VMWARE as a platform for the Windchill Production Servers?

Thanks for the feedback



Vivek

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ShawnLothrop1-Visitor
1-Visitor
January 13, 2011
There was a thread back in November that discussed the performance of PDMLink on 9.1 at
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