Re: What should sys admins know about Oracle?

Jonathan Gennick wrote:

> 
> Chris brings up something that I was just thinking about the
> other day. There are some key things about Oracle that
> system administrators may not understand by default. What
> are they? What do you want your system administrators to
> know about Oracle?

"If anything happens, write down exactly what Oracle said, and wait for me to get back."

They need to know:

• What changes we make to the kernel configuration, if any, and why.
• What changes we make to system boot and shutdown scripts, if any.
• What shared libraries and headers are needed for Oracle programmers.
• What TCP/IP ports we use (TNS or CORBA or RMI)
• What applications on the machine/network are dependant on the database.
• Why Oracle processes look a lot bigger than they are (shared memory is often shown as being part of each process). Saves them panicking!
• Why we sometimes like RAID1 and sometimes like RAID5 or RAID 10, and why we like lots of independant mount points.
• That you cannot backup Oracle with ufsdump.
• That a tablespace is like a filesystem, and a schema is like a home directory, and that you don't create a tablespace for every user.
• That these very large datafiles which appeared the other day aren't going to double in size by next week, because they're mostly empty at the moment.
• That an Oracle server cannot get its IP address from DHCP.
• That Oracle is *supposed* to use all the disk, CPU and memory. That's why the server is there in the first place!

Ok, I'll stop now before I get carried away... :0)

g

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