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RE: looking for tool to help consolidate Oracle schemas within Or acle instances and Oracle instances on AIX servers

From: Justin Cave (DDBC) <jcave_at_ddbcinc.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 09:39:43 -0600
Message-ID: <87E9F113CEF1D211A4C30090273018741BBCA7@ddbcinc.ddbc.local>


Can you clarify your assumptions in the statement that "there isn't much difference in hardware requirements", particularly regarding RAM? Are you assuming that the RAM allocated to the SGA's for each of the instances on a machine can be tuned such that it is roughly equivalent to the total RAM needed for a single integrated instance... That tends to be an unusual in my experience-- two instances on a machine generally require significantly more RAM than one instance would because of the redundant dictionary caches, background processes, etc. In the pathological cases (i.e. 20 instances on a single machine), that redundancy got pretty hefty... =20

In addition, you don't see the same degree of benefit to differently timed workloads-- one instance may do its heavy batch processing from 1-5am, where another does its processing from 4-7am. If they were integrated, the second could take advantage of the SGA that the other wasn't using from 5-7 (or 1-4). If they are separate instances, though, you need both SGA's around all the time.

Justin Cave
Distributed Database Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of DENNIS WILLIAMS Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 8:16 AM
To: 'oracle-l_at_freelists.org'
Subject: RE: looking for tool to help consolidate Oracle schemas within Or acle instances and Oracle instances on AIX servers

Jaco=20

   Here is what I believe.
1. Overall there isn't much difference in hardware requirements whether all workload goes through a single instance or multiple instances. I don't think you will be able to detect a difference. If you have other test results, please post them.
2. Once you've got an application installed, don't move it unless you have a good reason. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yes, I did change my philosophy, but I have only applied that changed philosophy to new applications. I didn't go back and consolidate existing applications. 3. Managers are tending to look at the database to DBA ratio. This is ridiculous, of course, but their responsibility is ensuring their DBA resources are being well-utilized. Until we propose something better, they will tend to look at this ratio. Just because your managers aren't looking at this ratio today doesn't mean they won't look at it tomorrow. It would be ironic that you go through an extensive consolidation effort only to have management decide they have too many DBAs now that the ratio looks better.
4. I don't think there is a lot of difference between supporting X users on one instance or across several instances. As you have outlined yourself, there are factors both ways that tend to cancel each other out. By consolidating instances you must examine resource usage more carefully.
5. I think that DBA effort is minimized by configuring an instance properly when it is installed and then leaving it alone. Too many DBAs have the "perfectionism" disease. A lot of problems are self-inflicted. 6. If making continual changes promotes your value to management and keeps you employed, then I am in favor of continual changes, since I like a regular paycheck. But I'm still hoping for that independently wealthy thing.

Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com=20

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org]On Behalf Of J.Polet_at_Robeco.nl Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 5:52 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: looking for tool to help consolidate Oracle schemas within Or acle instances and Oracle instances on AIX servers

Dennis,

It is very interesting to hear that you are tending to go the opposite direction based on your experience.

The benefits we are hoping the achieve is easier database management and less hardware resources.
We know that management will become complexer when consolidating schemas in instances but we think we can handle that by using the right tools in the right way.

In our envirmont we do have same vendor applications with specific Oracle requirements but most of our application are just looking for a set of tables to store their data without extra requirements about the oracle version or oracle features. Even some vendor applications, as a result of their database indepency, are using the database for basic datastore.
That is the reason why we think that we can consolidate most of our applications in a minimum number of instances. We are in fact already doing that in some instances for applications for which there are no special requirements and for which there are no risks of conflicts between application schema's as a result of for example usage of public synonyms or user definitions.

Our idea is to set up a consolidated database environment consisting of a minimum number of instances running two oracle versions. When an application schema meets our requirements it can be added to this enviroment. If it doesn't meet our requirements it will end up in a dedicated instances and in some cases even on a dedicated UNIX server. The costs for database management in the consolidated environment will be the lowest.
This idea can only work when their is a management commitment on all levels, Could that be the reason why this didn't work in your situation?

In order to create a stable consolidated database environment we need tools voor monitoring en managing resource usage.

Jaco

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 (Embedded image moved to                NL Telephone: +31 (0) 10 224
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J.Polet_at_robeco.nl=20
 Jaco Polet

 Corporate ICT/BS DBA

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                      DENNIS WILLIAMS

                      <DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOU         To:
"'oracle-l_at_freelists.org'" <oracle-l_at_freelists.org>
                      CH.COM>                    cc:

                      Sent by:                   Subject: RE: looking
for
tool to help consolidate Oracle schemas within Or acle        =20
                      oracle-l-bounce_at_fr         instances and Oracle
instances on AIX servers                                          =20
                      eelists.org

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                      20-04-2004 15:58

                      Please respond to

                      oracle-l

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Jaco

   What are the benefits you hope to achieve by consolidating schemas within an instance? I can see several potential problems, especially if these are vendor-supported applications. It may be difficult to upgrade to new Oracle versions because different vendors will provide support for a new Oracle version at different times. Another issue is that each schema may support a different group of users, and one group of users may be eager to move to a new Oracle version while another group of users doesn't see this as a priority. After years of trying to consolidate schemas as much as possible, I've tended to go the opposite direction in recent years.

Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org]On Behalf Of J.Polet_at_Robeco.nl Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 3:21 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: looking for tool to help consolidate Oracle schemas within Oracle instances and Oracle instances on AIX servers

Hi all,

I am currently working on a consolidation project. Within this project we want to consolidate Oracle schemas within Oracle 8.1.7.4/ 10g instances and Oracle instances on AIX 5.2 servers.

We see 3 potential problems:
1. How do we prevent instances and schema's influencing each others performance?
2. How do we determine which schemas can be consolidated within the same instance from a resource usage point of view? 3. How do we determine which instances can be consolidated on the same server from a resource usage point of view?

To address our first problem we are looking at the Oracle Resource Manager for controlling the resource usage of schemas within the same instance and AIX Workload Manager to control resource usage of instances on the same server.

For our second and third problem we want to create a shortlist of 3 (combination of) tools to evaluate which should be able to: - Measure the usage of instance resources like buffer cache, redo/undo blocks, open cursors etc. on a schema level. - Measure the available instance resources within an instance - Measure the usage of server resources (CPU, Memory, Disk IO, Network IO) on a schema level and on an instance level. - Measure the available server resources within a server

Does anyone has an idea of which (combination of) tools I should put on this shortlist?

Thanks... Jaco

=20


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Received on Wed Apr 21 2004 - 10:34:45 CDT

Original text of this message

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