[gaius]

You can, right now, go to Dell's website and buy, off the shelf, a server with 144G of RAM. Stick Red Hat on it and Oracle considers it fully supported. The days of "vanity" brands that you'd stick behind a glass partition and take your investors on a tour of the datacentre to see are loooong gone.

And the reason you need devs and DBAs to be separate isn't one of different skills at all, both speak PL/SQL fluently. It's just if the regulator of your industry requires that the code be developed and deployed by different people. If not, it's normal for the two camps to have significant overlap.

[benblack]

Yes, you can go buy name-brand hardware (Dell, IBM, Sun, HP) in a special configuration not used anywhere else in your infrastructure and install an OS on it which you don't run on any other system, all just so you can have the honor of paying Oracle. That was my point.

[gaius]

Eh? Dell is very much not a brand like IBM or HP, they are pioneers in the field of cheap generic hardware. That's why I chose them as an example! And Red Hat is hardly an obscure OS these days either... And Oracle runs happily on Windows or many other common OSs too...