Oracle DBA role question

Hi,
I don't really consider myself a DBA. However, for reasons out of my control that seems to be the career path I am currently on. I've been an Oracle application developer for 7 years and the company I am currently with has no DBA and I am it, so I've been learning under fire in a test/development environment.

Our project is about 60% complete and we have begun preliminary planning of our production environment (which is still at least 6 months away).

Some things I have been tasked with performing research on:

Hardware purchase decisions: Should we deploy oracle on NT, Linux, Unix and if Unix, (Sun, HP, AIX)...How much processing power we will need in terms of servers/cpus? Should we deploy Oracle Parallel Server? What type of storage will we need? How many disks? Should ee purchase a storage solution like Legato or EMC? Do we implement RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5 etc, etc...

The above questions are just hypothetical, please do not respond to them. The real question is: Are these types of things that the average DBA would be able to resolve or are they more commonly handled by bringing in consultants? My experience with databases is pretty extensive, unfortunately it stops at the database level and I don't have much experience in the physical/hardware level. I will definitely need to bring in external help to assist with these issues, but I am just curious to know from some seasoned DBAs if this is or should be a standard base of knowledge that most *good* DBAs have. (Do the oracle certification exams touch on these types of questions?)

Sorry for the open-ended question and thanks for any input. Regards,
Gavin

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Before you buy. Received on Tue Sep 12 2000 - 03:07:01 CDT