Oracle 10g questions?

We are considering migrating to Oracle 10g in the next 12 months and I had a few questions. (I am the system engineer so not a full fledged Sr. Oracle DBA)

First, is Oracle 10g similiar to the Oracle Parallel Server of old? ie: Is it basically 2 or more systems that are using the same physical disks? If so, is using raw devices still a requirement or are there any other filesystem based solutions that will work. (ie: Oracle or Veritas?)

We currently are running 9.2.0.4 on Solaris 9 64-bit using Veritas Database Edition for Oracle 3.5. (Which I am assuming the Veritas software would be useless for a 10g installation correct?) Our desire is to segregate our Oracle workload accross 2 or more systems. We would also like to be able to perform system maintenance while keeping the database online 24x7. Is this possible with 10g by keeping at least 1 node online while others are brought down for maintenance?

I am due to take some 10g trainnig but I had some budgetary deadlines I needed to meet this week and was trying to get a ballpark idea of hardware/software costs as well as support.

Lastly, we also plan to move from our current Sun Sparc III based systems to Solaris x86 on some of the new AMD based Opeteron 64-bit systems. (I am assuming for the purpose of budgeting that all related software components support 64-bit Solaris x86 at this time) I know 64-bit x86 still has not been released so likely Oracle doesn't support it yet. (but they are usually quick to follow)

I'm curious if there is anyone here with similiar plans as well. It would be great to share experiences and notes. This is a pretty big undertaking and probably a bit risky to go with such cutting edge hardware but the cost savings would be enormous compared to our current Sun/Oracle/Veritas hardware/support/software costs. (and I'm hoping to cut Veritas completely out of the picture as well)

Thanks for any info,
Chuck Received on Wed Sep 29 2004 - 14:15:49 CDT