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

"DA Morgan" <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:1098421450.448466_at_yasure...
> Runs with Scissors wrote:
>
>> 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
>
> The Boeing division I consult for does something similar ... single
> laptop with 10g, Orion App Server, 30GB database, Windows because sales
> people couldn't handle any real operating system. Why on earth would you
> want RAID anything? Who gives a rip if a transaction is lost. Works just
> fine.
>
> Beyond that you are getting into asking the questions for which people
> that perform consulting expect to be paid.
>
> --
> Daniel A. Morgan
> University of Washington
> damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
> (replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)

Thanks for the response.

I wasn't concerned about integrity of the system as a reason for the RAID. I was thinking along the lines of spreading IO across more than one spindle. As far as I know, the large number of reads expected from a data warehouse would be better performing if striped.

I wouldn't consider this to be a question a consultant could contemplate answering in a newsgroup. I think it more academic or historical (i.e. Does anyone have similar experiences they would care to share?) in nature. Maybe I wasn't clear enough that I was asking for peoples experiences, while leaving the discussion open for things in the nature of "have you considered [insert facet here]?"

Tom Received on Fri Oct 22 2004 - 15:22:28 CDT