Re: Need advice on Some Servers for Oracle7/8

riad_at_innocent.com wrote in message <7126fe$fmk$1_at_nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
>Hello.
>
>I am trying to find a suitable hardware configuration for hosting an Oracle
>server (probably oracle8). This server would host an instance of 6 gigs
>minimum, where most of the operatons would be "Select", lot of "group by",
>"order", etc.

Seems very similar to a lot of the datawarehouse style stuff we do. We run Oracle7 and Oracle8 db's from 5 to 250 Gig.

My suggestions for a lot of 'select' and 'group by' and 'order by' would be to try and exploit as much parallelism as you can. A 4 CPU box with Oracle Parallel Query and heavy use of the Oracle Partitioning Option (costed extra, Oracle 8 only) would probably give you the best return on investment. Make sure you stripe your disks to get some decent throughput, and monitor your SGA (and OS paging) to make sure your RAM is sufficient. In fact monitor *everything* you do, never take anything on spec. - (SGA stats, OS stats, SQL plans, etc.)

You really need to read-up and get trained in using parallel technologies to really exploit all of this. If you have the space, you might also want to hold multiple levels of summary data, to minimize the CPU you consume with constant re-runs of 'order and group' operations.

>The inserts are not critical (done once a day, 100 megs of
>inserts a day, with 1 months history, thus the 6 gigs).
>Also, and the most important part, this instance must handle 30 users at
the
>same time. (So i think a big RAM and CPU cache is needed).

Might want to look at RAID5 for your data and indexes. You take a hit on writes, but if you can live with it, you'll get good read performance and cheap(ish) fault-tolerance.

As for how much RAM and CPU you need for 30 users, that's impossible to say. Do some testing, and buy a box with lots of expansion potential.

>
>So here is the question: NT server (bi-PII or quadri-PII, how much ram ?)
>or Unix station (Solaris, DEC, 32/64 bits) ?

Well, we run small stuff on NT, large stuff on UNIX. I find UNIX is more stable and performs better, but NT is OK for smaller (i.e. under 50G) systems.

>The requirments is that the machine doesn't have to be very expensive
>(something like 20.000$-30.000$).
>
>Thanks in advance a lot...
>
>Riad
>
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Received on Mon Oct 26 1998 - 11:00:25 CST