Re: Oracle DBA role question

A reasonably experienced DBA should expect to encounter such questions, because a lot of them have DBA connotations which should be answerable from general experience and an understanding of the needs of the database you are administering.

For example: what O/S? NT is easy, Linux is cheap and stable, solaris is highly extensible. That impacts on growth issues, and for 'up time' questions. (IE, if your database is anticipated to serve 200 Users, only with a nightly shutdown maintenance window, NT might be OK. But if 2000 Users with 24 hours up-time expected, I'd be starting to look elsewhere).

Another: any basic understanding of Oracle should lead you immediately to say 'RAID 5 is a complete no-no'. Mirroring is nice (but not essential, because there are multiplexing features within Oracle itself), and striping is OK, but could possibly compromise performance -it depends on the solution offered. The decision on RAID, therefore, comes directly from your understanding of Oracle's behaviour and its requirements.

Parallel Server is a redundancy issue -again, your answer will depend on how redundant your application needs to be, and that's definitely a job for a DBA to assess.

The answer to 'how many disks' is an easy one: 'how much can you afford'. Again depending on performance requirements, the more the better!

So what I'm trying to say is that although these sound like hardware and O/S questions, they impact directly on how your database is expected to grow, how reliably it is expected to stay up, and so on... and these are definitely DBA decisions.

Regards
HJR

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<gdas_at_my-deja.com> wrote in message news:8pko6s$oce$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com...


> 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

>

>

>

> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/

> Before you buy.