Spec'ing an Oracle 8 DB Server

Hope someone here can help

I'm looking to spec out an Oracle 8 DB server for a web application which will be written in mostly Perl with HTML/Javascript. The database design is not finished yet, but it's expected that initially there will be a lot of writes to the database as users create acounts with multiple fields like name/address type stuff as well as some longer say 255 character fields with in depth information. So we're probably talking about 20, 80 char fields and say 10, 255 char fields.

Not sure at this stage what the average read/write would be but once the users are set up then it'll mostly be reads from the database with intermittent updates occurring. There will also be internal users of the db maintaining the outside users, running web reports etc. Is there any benefit to using 8i vs 8 if I'm just doing Perl/DBI connects to the database and not really using the web features of 8i. Are there any decent documents anywhere describing the differences between the two.

My current idea for hardware is
Dual say pentium 500/600 processor Dell/HP Netserver 1Gb RAM
Raid 5 or Raid 1+0 (Not sure if I need the more expensive 1+0 !)

Any idea what size of disks to start off with, I presume you can add drives to a Raid setup easily ?? What about cache size ?

Server operating system will be Redhat 6.1.

Are there any 'metrics' that more experienced users have used, would love to hear from someone who's done it before !

Thanks in advance

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy. Received on Tue Apr 11 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT