Re: Oracle 10g questions?

Comments in-line.

Keg wrote:

> 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?

Only related by having the same parent. The children are very different.

> 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?)

RAW is not required and probably of zero value. What you want is a cluster file system such as that provided by NetApp.

> 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?)

Not useless ... just unnecessary.

  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?

Depends on what you mean by maintenance. Remember you are bringing down the instance ... not the database.

> 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.

You might want to contact the Puget Sound Oracle Users Group (http://www.psoug.org) if you are in the US or Canada.

> 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)

An H/P DL360 will smoke a Sun Sparc III. And AMD chip or IBM P5 will do even better. The difference is that the DL360 will cost only a small fraction of the others.

> 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

Currently running 10g in production at a division of the Boeing Company. Would be happy to discuss it with you off-line.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with 'u' to respond)