Re: Most humble newbie begs the elders for bits of wisdom

Oracle Navigator (a simple GUI tool for looking at the schema objects) was prone to lock-ups and freezes when I saw it in use around Jan'99. Basically its poor quality.

Quite why is a mystery as I think it's written in Java (wiiling to be corrected, of course) and Oracle are committed to java at the moment.

If Oracle Navigator has not been improved much by Oracle then I seriously suggest that replacing it with another way of 'browsing' the contents of your tables / views etc. Maybe some kind of front end which allows OLE-DB / ODBC links to a database.

On the W32 platform, unfortunately I have to say that in my experience 'Oracle Navigator' is actually the poorest piece of software that Oracle have distributed, and it is significantly worse than anything else I've seen from them.

I would not worry about the core Oracle server process (there's only 1 on W32) . Near here, some Win32 development boxes have been running PO8 / 8.0.5 EE (NT) for 1 yr, 5 months now and I've yet to hear of this core process crashing.

Sounds like you have lots of RAM to play with. With a properly tuned database it should fly pretty fast, don't you worry!

It may be worth trying to contact Oracle or a company with Oracle skills who could send someone out for 1/2 day just to have a quick look at the server. It will probably only take them about 1/2 hour to understand the basic goings-on of the database, and I'm sure that they would be able to suggest and implement some tuning measures which could speed things up on the server side. They would also be able to see your infrastructure and thus also recommend the most appropriate 'front-end' to use instead of Oracle Navigator.

David P.

Oracle Certified DBA.