Migrating to the latest Oracle 10g, consolidating servers and moving to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) are also top priorities for the 812 IOUG members who responded to the survey. The results were released this week in advance of the annual IOUG meeting, Collaborate 2006, which is set for later this month in Nashville. About half of the respondents are database administrators, with a fifth coming from the development and architecture community and 13 percent working as IT managers or executives.

While commercial Unix still dominates as the platform for Oracle databases and applications, Linux is expected to become the leading platform by next year, with 44 percent of respondents expecting to run Linux. That would surpass Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris OS, whose share is expected to drop by next year, despite Sun's open-sourcing of Solaris 10 in 2005.

'There is still a good cost savings associated with moving to Linux, and companies are clearly putting their money where their mouths are,' said Ari Kaplan, president of IOUG.

Oracle has supported Linux since 1999 and its ability to run on farms of PC-based servers via built-in clustering and grid technologies make it a 'compelling choice, since lashing groups of these processors together can provide the same scalability as more expensive Unix hardware,' according to the survey.

At Linuxworld in Boston this week, Oracle offered up several announcements: Its cluster file system has been accepted into the mainline Linux kernel and it introduced a data center package of applications for users running Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.