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According to the FreeBSD Corporate Networkers Guide, FreeBSD developers or BSDI people were working with Oracle to port Oracle to FreeBSD. Does anyone know the status of this?

John Dyson (dyson@jdyson.com) posted in a Usenet article in comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc on 4/09/01 that there was a commercial port of Oracle for another product from Oracle that never saw fruition. It was for an earlier version of Oracle than the Linux port. There was talk that the Oracle port would be released standalone on FreeBSD when I wrote the book, which is why I mentioned it.

You can run the current Oracle for Linux on FreeBSD; see the link

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=7927+13188+/usr/local/www/db/text/ 2000/freebsd-database/20001210.freebsd-database

http://jordan.fortwayne.com/oracle/index.html

It's important to understand that the various FreeBSD support forums and mailing lists and newsgroups are not the place to ask this question. Oracle is a commercial company, and if they never hear requests for a commercial port of Oracle for FreeBSD from potential customers, then they certainly won't spend any effort on one.

One helpful thing that has occurred is that in December 2001, Sun licensed the Java Development Kit into FreeBSD. See the FreeBSD Foundation at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/. Oracle's installer uses Java.

Keep in mind that there are several other obstacles to a FreeBSD port of Oracle:

1. Hacks like the above perpetuate the Linux port of Oracle at the expense of pressure for a FreeBSD port.
2. Both Postgres and MySQL are getting so good that they have sucked off many of the potential Oracle customers from FreeBSD.
3. There's a lot involved for a commercial ISV to release a port of a software package. For starters, there has to be a committed cadre of people within that company to support the port. The fact that this has happened with Oracle for Linux may mean that most of the developers in position within Oracle to drive this are in fact Linux supporters and have no interest in FreeBSD.
4. Sun has changed their Solaris licensing so that you can basically run Solaris for free on a uniprocessor Intel system. Since historically Oracle and Sun have worked so closely together, people needing to build a reliable, supported, production Oracle database server cheaply can buy cheap Intel-based PCs and load Solaris on them and have the same cost for a server platform for Oracle as a FreeBSD platform.

Fortunately all of these obstacles can be very rapidly overcome with money. Like the saying goes, if Oracle for FreeBSD is important to you, then be proactive and tell Oracle that, until they port to FreeBSD, your spending your database dollars on something other than Oracle.

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© Copyright 2000-2003 Ted Mittelstaedt. All rights reserved.