Oracle on a laptop - how to support large-scale sales demos

I am currently working on a project for a Business Performance Management application. The initial goal of the project is to develop a demonstrable application that our sales force can show to potential clients. The targeted clients will be higher echelon retailers (read as very large data sets). One requirement of the project is to deploy, onto a single laptop, the application server/web server, analytic engine, and database - including a realistic data set (i.e. a few/several gigabytes of data) in order to provide realistic demonstrations. Note that in this case, several gigabytes of data represent a very small sample of the real-world product solution, say 1-5%. The primary reason for the single box deployment is to allow an anytime/anyplace demonstration. No network access required. They will not be demonstrating multi-users capabilities.

Basically, They (aka Management) want a magical solution.

The deployment will be Oracle 9i or 10g (Enterprise Edition), Web Sphere 5.0.2, and an analytic engine I'm not free to specify at this time. The BPM application will include several star-schema data marts covering things like sales, inventory, planned sales, purchases, planned inventory, etc. The application must also emulate a real-time data feed, so the database will be a "general" database doing both transaction processing and data warehousing functions.

I'm assuming that we will be able to get top-of-the-line laptops running some flavor of Linux (probably Red Hat), but still, a single CPU and single drive smells like a performance disaster to me, not to mention a 2gig memory limit. I'm looking for alternatives in the deployment model. One thing that comes to mind is a portable USB RAID solution with 5 or more drives in a RAID0 or RAID5 configuration. Another might be a three-laptop deployment where each laptop supports a specific server, or, possibly a combination of the two.

Does anyone have similar experiences they would care to share? Alternative ideas on how to get enterprise performance out of a single CPU? Know any good magic spells, or rules-of-thumb to quantify the performance expected in a real-world deployment?

Thanks in advance,

Tom Received on Thu Oct 21 2004 - 14:23:39 CDT