11g on Linux x86_64 is out!

This morning, I was surprised to learn that the Linux x86_64 announcement release was not in this Oracle New Downloads RSS Feed. I got aware of the news reading Niall Litchfield Blog. I guess news travels faster via the Oracle blog community! , also, I thought Oracle would have normally released 11g for other o/s prior to releasing the Linux x86_64 version. In any case, I will download this release now.

It is now available here: Oracle 11g on Linux x86_64.

I have been waiting for this release for a while since two of my databases are stuck to 32 bits as they need to send and receive data using “hsodbc” (only available for 32bit) for an ERP software.

Heterogeneous systems are quite common, and I am pretty sure that many of the enhancement requests for Generic Connectivity were focused on making them available for 64-bit platforms.
The
Metalink Note:361676.1, Is Generic Connectivity Available On The LINUX Or Windows 64-bit Platforms? , explains that Generic Connectivity will be available on Linux Red Hat 64-bit and SUSE 64-bit with 11gR1.

Another reason that makes me appreciate this new release is that I ran through several issues while trying to run Oracle with larger SGA’s on 32 bits platforms. I used RAMFS and HugePages to enable the use of 8 to 10GB of SGAs. The following links helped me in this process:

Tuning and Optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Oracle 9i and 10g Databases

Metalink Note: 317141.1, How to Configure RHEL 4 32-bit for Very Large Memory with ramfs and HugePages

I am hoping that “hsodbc” will work fine on 11g x86_64; I’ll keep you posted on my findings…