Re: 10g or 9.2?

Tim Smith wrote:

> Hi,
> Our small business uses 8.0.5 Standard Edition for 20-60 user
> applications. Lots of stored procedures, Powerbuilder 6.5, MS .Net
> 1.1. We would like to upgrade to a new version and are deciding
> between 9i or 10g.
> If we go with 10g then we are offered RAC free with Standard
> Edition otherwise we must upgrade to Enterprise Edition in 9.2. That
> appears to be the main benefit of 10.2
>
> 10.2 is 2 months out of beta and 9.2 will be supported until (very
> rough sales estimate 2009).
>
> Some developers wish to go to 10g so they dont need to upgrade
> again for a while. One DBA thinks 10g is too new. One DBA thinks RAC
> is easy. I recall Oracle Parallel Server was a bear and I am not sure
> what benefits RAC will give us with our small 2 node dual CPU server
> which already has interfaces/webapplications on the non-Oracle node.
>
> If it takes 9 months to migrate, 10g will be out for 11 months. Are
> they are reasons not to go directly to 10g?
>
> Tim

What is your company's policy about upgrading all the other software components you use? Just follow that for Oracle too.

If you are still using 8.0.5, my guess is either the policy is VERY conservative, or you might need to configure your systems in such a way that upgrades are not so overwhelmingly expensive (in terms of labor to migrate). Plan for major software upgrades every 18-24 months, if you don't already.

A middle-of-the road approach is to wait for two service packs (patches) before upgrading, this has served well for Windows, Oracle, Solaris, Perl, and almost any other software I have used in a commercial environment where your revenue depends on keeping production up and running. Besides, you'll have your hands full just migrating off of 8.0.5 and starting to use the "basic" new features available since that version, so I'd forget RAC for now. Just go with 9.2 Standard Edition and then upgrade to 10g with RAC later if you still want to, it'll be a much smaller bite.

And yes, as you guessed, running RAC on a two-node cluster where you already have other critical apps running on one node is probably not a good use of RAC.

--Mark Bole Received on Fri May 07 2004 - 18:16:11 CDT