Web Databases, Continued

Understanding What's Right for You

Ease of use, training of personnel, your existing setup, networking requirements, cost: all of these should be part of your decisionmaking process when choosing between Unix and NT. Combined with information about the three S's (security, scalability, stability), these factors should give you a clear picture of what you need.

Ease of use
In terms of ease of use, the main difference between Unix and Windows NT is in the interface. NT has a fairly advanced and aesthetically pleasing graphical user interface (GUI), compared to the command-line interface that is the default for Unix. Both operating systems offer alternatives, making it possible for a user to change the interface. With Windows NT, you can open a DOS command shell and issue commands from the command line when you like. And there are GUIs available for Unix that can let you perform many of the functions which used to be relegated to the command line only (KDE, FVWM, and others). At its core, though, Windows NT remains a GUI-driven operating system. Unix remains a command-line system.

The advantage of a GUI is that most of the commands that you'll need to maintain your machine are available through menus. By pointing and clicking, you can do most of the configuration of your machine. You won't have to memorize many commands. If you forget exactly how to accomplish a particular task, you can generally meander through menus until you get to the program or configuration file which you need. You don't have to know exactly where everything is, assuming you're willing to spend some time exploring. The problem with this approach, though, is that someone else has determined what menus you have to burrow through to get your job done. You're stuck with the logic of the people who designed the system.

The advantage of a command-line interface is flexibility and speed. Once you know where everything is on your Unix machine, you can generally access it without having to navigate through a complex series of menus. You can access any possible action from the command line, regardless of what directory you are in. You don't have to spend time looking for things in menus, and you don't have to follow the logic of the people who built your OS. You can impose your own logic on your machine.

One interesting development in the Unix world (specifically in the Linux world) is the development of several independent GUIs aimed at making the system more user-friendly. The leading such GUI, KDE, offers a less complicated, more easily configured interface than you'll usually find on Unix. KDE is less likely to scare away "point-and-click" consumers, who are more likely to feel at home using Macintosh or Windows. Ease of use is one area in which the Unix world is trying to catch up with the Windows world.

Personnel training
Another thing to keep in mind is the knowledge of the people currently maintaining the machine, as well as those who will be maintaining it in the future. If your tech support group consists of people with years of experience in Windows NT but there is not one experienced Unix system administrator to be found, it may make sense to use Windows NT. If Windows NT systems administrators in your area get paid twice as much as Unix sysadmins or are harder to find, it may make sense to go with Unix. Of course, it's generally a good idea to have both Unix and Windows NT administrators in your organization if possible. Otherwise, you may find yourself unable to take advantage of useful tools that are available on only one of these two platforms.

Keep in mind that Windows NT is not "just like Windows 95." In addition to being more powerful, Windows NT has a lot of administrative issues that a Windows 95 user never has to deal with. You shouldn't buy Windows NT just because your technical people already use another version of Windows. They are very different animals, despite the surface similarities.

Your existing setup
Obviously, if you've already got a number of machines of one flavor sitting around, it can make sense to use that platform, because the software has already been bought and/or installed. If you have some older computers (2 or more years old) lying around that run painfully slowly under Windows NT, you may want to try installing Linux on them. Because it doesn't have a GUI (and because its developers have concentrated on making its code lean and mean), Linux needs far less powerful hardware to get the job done. Even a 75MHz PC with 32 megabytes of memory should be sufficient to run a fairly busy web site on Linux, while it would run noticeably slower on Windows NT.

Networking requirements
It is fairly easy to set up either a Windows NT machine or a Unix box to work on a LAN, and to serve as a file or print server for other computers. But administering a web server and database remotely works differently, depending on the choice of platform you make. With Unix, you can telnet in to your server from any machine with a telnet client (which is available, free, for all computers) and perform all the same administrative functions that you could from the desktop.

With Windows NT, you cannot perform all those same administrative functions—for example, you can't run those command-line options which every NT administrator eventually discovers are easier to use, and sometimes necessary to do their job. Remote administration tends to be easier for Unix machines than for Windows NT.

Cost
Price is always worth considering when making hardware and software purchases. For example, Linux, one version of Unix that is gaining in popularity, is free. With a free operating system and the variety of free software tools available for Linux, your cost of software ownership could be as low as, well, nothing. Zero dollars.

Windows NT, on the other hand, costs upwards of $500. When you add to that the price of the various software tools that tend to run well on NT—Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle, Visual Basic, etc.—your costs will approach several thousand dollars. In addition, the hardware needed to run Windows NT well is more expensive than the software necessary to run Linux, since you'll need faster equipment and more memory.

Commercial versions of Unix (such as Solaris) tend to cost even more than Windows NT. In addition, the software that runs on Solaris and other commercial Unix versions is generally more expensive than that for Windows NT.

What about the Macintosh?
Of course, you can also run your database on the Macintosh OS. Their operating system is certainly much more stable with the release of MacOS 8.0 (and higher versions) than it has been so far.

A number of good web servers are available for the Macintosh: WebStar, WebTen (Tenon's port of Apache), and others. There is also a web server bundled with FileMaker Pro, a database available on the Macintosh and other platforms. Publishing a FileMaker Pro database on the Web is very easy to do.

The main reason to run your database or web server on a Macintosh is ease of use. A Macintosh is in general easier to use, easier to configure, and easier to administer than any of the alternatives. If you or your team members only have Macintosh experience, this could be the choice for you (assuming you recognize that your Macintosh server will most likely fail more often than one on Unix or Windows NT).

For the purposes of this article, we won't be looking in-depth at any Macintosh-based databases. Until Apple releases an even more stable operating system, like Rhapsody or perhaps Mac OS X, the ease of use of a Macintosh won't outweigh the stability of Unix.

What does Anchor use?
Anchor runs on two Linux machines, the faster of which has a 120 MHz processor, which provides all the speed we need for running Linux. The web site is on one machine. The database is on the other.

We run Unix for the basic reasons detailed above. It offers a lot more control to the administrator, runs faster than Windows NT, and is much easier to connect to remotely. In addition, as the systems administrator for Anchor, I'm comfortable with Unix. I've used it for over 7 years, and it's my server platform of choice.

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