Re: Advice/Consultant wanted

Dean,

As a basic resource, I would recommend Mike Ault's book on Oracle DBA.

What to do really depends on how quickly you may need to ramp up your volume. At the initial level you predict, just about anything would work. At the top end, I would feel more comfortable with a Unix-based solution instead of Windows NT. If you will have the time to keep an eye on things, you should have a reasonable amount of warning time before you have to convert. One of the advantages of Oracle is that it runs on just about every piece of hardware on Earth.

My company, Database Architechs, specializes in providing consulting services to customers such as yourself. A basic visit, covering the three major areas of DBA focus, backup & recovery, performance, and security, can be accomplished in a week, maybe less if the setup is simple enough.

My basic hardware advice is to get plenty of RAM and plenty of hard drives. In your case 256MB of RAM, expandable to 512MB, should be fine for a while. Also, I would get a minimum of eight disk drives at the beginning, on a machine with the capacity to hold sixteen or more. The biggest single mistake most shops make when they procure a database server is not getting enough disk drives. It isn't a matter only of being able to hold your data, it's a matter of how many disk arms can be working simultaneously. This is frequently the biggest bottleneck in performance.

Where are you located?

Mark Wallace

Dean Skogman wrote:

> I am a beginning Oracle DBA, working with Oracle 8 (possibly Enterprise) on
> NT 4.0. We are developing a internet application which we plan to move into
> production in late spring. I've got the schema design done (as we know it
> at this point), a development server and database up and running, and about
> half the store procs written (not too well, I'm sure). It's a small
> database with about 20some tables with about half of them being simple
> lookup tables.
>
> Our application will be low traffic at first. We’re looking at 1000s of
> transactions per day at first, with reporting at off-peak hours. Eventually
> these numbers would (hopefully) go up to 10,000s to 100,000s per day, so
> scalability and tuning will be an issue, but not a huge one at first.
>
> I'm experienced with SQL and schema design, but lacking in the areas of
> database setup, tuning, backups/restores, parallel processing and
> replication. I am looking for a consultant to set up our production
> database/server. Any advice on consulting firms?
>
> How long should this take?
>
> I need some up front advice on the hardware requirements as well, so we
> could have this in house before we would bring in the consultant. Any
> advice on resources (people or places) for this?
>
> If more details are needed let me know.
>
> Please respond by email.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Dean Skogman
> TransCent, Inc.
> dskogman_at_transcent.com
Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 23:34:27 CST