The "need" for Oracle components or its DBMS  on the HP3000 should be viewed by
HP as an opportunity to sell hardware, and to further expose the e3000 to an
enormous market.   Oracle performs so well in the HP3000 environment that HP has
a solid winner when choosing platforms, if they would dare to promote this.

 We have been running Oracle on our HP3000 platform for 4 years now.  Other than
a network services / Oracle transport layer induced system abort problem, Oracle
has run flawlessly.   We currently have 32 Oracle applications and about 140
concurrent Oracle users on our systems - an HP987.  Average cpu is about 60%
during peak usage, this includes TurboImage applications.  The response time is
excellent - given the size of the box against what it has to run.

Let's not start a thread here about the virtues of TurboImage vs Oracle - I
fully agree that Oracle costs many times more, is more difficult to learn, takes
more people to manage, takes more horsepower to run - been there, doing that.
The problem we are facing is the direction our company has taken, along with
many others, to purchase external packages and run them on Oracle.  Without
exception, everything our apps people bring in to look at run on Oracle.  Not
one has TurboImage as a possibility.  Even Big Iron is losing out in a big
way....

The days of Oracle on the HP3000 are coming to a close for us.  Last year, we
started to see a number of Oracle applications require 8.0 or higher to run.
The highest version supported on the HP3000 is 7.3.4 with no plans to go
forward.  Thus, a decision was made to bring in large 4 way NT servers to run
the 8.0 apps.  We got up to eleven 4 way servers running a total of 15 apps,
some seeing response times of 3 - 4 minutes...our DBAs hate the admin aspects of
this platform.

Our next solution, which we are now beta testing, is an HP9000 N class with 2
440 processors and 5 gig memory.  Initial results show a slight improvement in
performance.  Although HP still sold hardware to run Oracle, they could have
easily have lost out to Sun.  Sun is a very acceptable platform for Oracle and
should see at least half of the business in this area.  The only reason we
choose HP is the acceptance of HP products in our company (given all else
equal).  This acceptance, ironically, was fostered by the reliability of the
HP3000!

I'm sure HP stopped putting money into Oracle on the HP3000 when they didn't see
a profitable return.  Perhaps if they advertised success stories to the Oracle
world, showed the cost / performance benefit, and given more time they could
have hit the critical mass to make a profit.  By stopping development long ago
at 7.3.4,  the possibility of widespread acceptance of the HP3000 as a viable
Oracle platform may not be possible.   Certainly for us, we will migrate our
HP3000 Oracle apps and NT Oracle apps to Unix.  One less reason to keep our
HP3000...