Oracle on Novell

From: Derham McAven <mcavend_at_admin.chchp.ac.nz>
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1993 18:26:09 GMT
Message-ID: <mcavend.23.741551169_at_admin.chchp.ac.nz>


As described elsewhere we had great difficulties in running a full production release of Oracle for SCO MPX on a DEC 433MP when it came to linking to Novell based clients - all running an Oracles Forms for DOS application.

Finally we gave up and implemented the Netware hosted version on a clone 486DX/33 thrown together from cannibalised existing systems. Building the host and porting the system took just three days and everything has worked really well since. In December we implemented an upgrade to a 486DX/50 EISA bus clone with 64 Mb RAM and it has purred since. We supported 50+ concurrent users in quite a demanding application during enrolments in January. We ran benchmark reports on the DEC ( single-user mode ) and the same on the Netware hosted unit - this is a dedicated host - it is not the FILESERVER - and the Netware box outperformed the DEC box quite substantially although the DEC box had twin 486DX/50 cpus. We are continuing with Netware based Oracle 6 ( worried about Oracle 7 stability yet ) and still have performance enhancement options left -

i.e.		1	faster disks and controller - RAID technology?
		2	32-bit EISA Ethernet card - 16bit only at present
		3	segmentation of the traffic - 2x32-bit EISA ENets
			instead of one
		4	increasing RAM to 128Mbytes
		5	not for a year but Pentium holds promise.
		6	replacing Forms 3 for DOS with Forms 4
			Forms 3 runs like a dog - it is still bound to 286 
			architecture and mode-switching kills performance.

[ Opinions are individual and not those of my employer. ]

Derham McAven Received on Thu Jul 01 1993 - 20:26:09 CEST

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