We are wanting to move from a large Sparc III based Sun box to 2 or
more smaller AMD64 based systems using Oracle 10g RAC. (We currently
run 9.2.0.4 w/o RAC) I know Solaris x86 64-bit is unreleased and also
Oracle 10.x on Solaris x86 as well, but they should be within the next
12 months.
I am the systems engineer and my DBA skills have not been Sr. level
since the 8.x days.
I just had a few 10g RAC questions. I am due for 10g trainig but I
have some budget deadlines before then and I need to get a rough idea
of hardware/software and support costs now.
- Is 10g RAC basically the parrallel server of old? Thus I am
assuming that all disk devices must be seen by all nodes in the
cluster and also must be using raw disk devices for storage? (or even
better, for example: Can node1 see disk group X, and node2 see disk
group X & Y, and then node 3 see disk group Y & Z. Can 10g RAC
function in that type of config? My purpose would be to segregate the
different applications so that they use specific nodes in our RAC, and
thus an SGA tuned for that application)
- Does 10g give me the capability to bring nodes down 1 at a time for
maintenance and keep the database online 24x7?
- How does archive logging work, is there a 'master' node that will
do the archiving or does each machine do archiving? (or can each
machine do archiving for redundanacy purposes or will each machine
generate it's own redo?)
- Does Veritas's Storage Foundation for Oracle manage raw disk
devices? (the current version of DBE 3.5 we are using cannot import
the same disk group to more than 1 machine at a time, so I am assuming
I can't use DBE for Oracle RAC, correct?)
- Lastly, we are mainly wanting to move to RAC because our
bottlenecks are in the SGA, and we have tuned to a point where tuning
can't get anything more for us. We can throw more hardware at the
system but won't be gaining much besides inflating
hardware/software/support costs. Our SAN is so fast and our
tablespaces are laid on onto so many dedicated volumes that we have
moved the bottleneck into the SGA itself. We have a myriad of
different applications and a myriad of different user usages so tuning
the SGA was a long and tedious process, and we feel our only viable
avenue for performance enhancement is Oracle RAC. (not to mention I
can reduce TCO by a significant amount going to the AMD64 platform)
So, am I correct in assumming that each node will have it's own SGA
and thus can tune each one differently than the other?
- With Oracle RAC, is there a way to route certain transactions to
certain nodes, (ie: Somehow cause application A to be handled by node
1, whereas application B might be handled by node 2, BUT, in the event
of a node failure, 1 node can handle all applications) There would
obviously be a huge performance hit in the event of a node failure but
at least operations will continue.
Thanks for any info,
chuck
Received on Fri Oct 01 2004 - 08:32:39 CDT
