Hardware for Oracle8(i) with ConText Option?

Hi,

I'm investigating what hardware options we should go with for a client that will be using Oracle8 (possibly 8i) with the ConText option. They currently use a competing product on SGI Irix with a 20Gb RAID for the documents. The reason for a change is that the current solution is slow and an update to the existing product in use is very expensive (believe it or not it cost more than buying an "internet version" (i.e. 32 user) of Oracle with ConText + a development licence).

The applications will hold about 1.5 million documents (and rising) most in HTML. I estimate 100% growth pr year for at least a couple of years. Major updates to the database will probably only happen weekly with occasional smaller updates more often (difficult to say at this point).

The client prefer Linux and "cheapish" hardware. So this means waiting for 8i I guess. An intermediate solution with NT is possible (although with much fewer documents) until 8i/Linux becomes available.

They also think RAID is good. I'm not sure if RAID is necessary? Are there any specific advantages with RAID over just a bunch of Ultra/Wide SCSI disks for ConText databases? As I said earlier I don't expect heavy updates to this database very often, more likely they'll do an update weekly (they already have a "robot" for this).

Uptime and recovery is as always an issue here, this wil be available on the internet and being down for any long streches of time would be "a bad thing". What would be recommended backup solutions? Just buy a buch of cheapish SCSI disks and mirror everything there? I'm not very knowledgable on Oracle and backup stuff (always had a DBA to do that ;) ), so I would like to know if there are any special considerations for ConText databases compared to just the plain vanilla RDBMS stuff. Would archive logging work? I was thinking we migth just push stuff out on some disks using archive logging and take a weekly backup on tape?

Many thanks for any answers or relevant pointers. Haakon T Soenderland
Core Technology AS
Oslo, Norway
www.core.no Received on Thu Dec 10 1998 - 03:40:11 CST