stability of Oracle?

• Quoting Markbr_at_Radian.Com to All dated 03-01-94 ***
  > Can anyone out there give me an idea of how stable Oracle is?
  > Scenario: several databases, running on one workstation, with
  > several people running in each database. In any one database,
  > one person may be running sql, another running a C > program w/ embedded
  sql, and another a report writer.

I assume you're unfamiliar with the terms, and not really suggesting that you will be running several instances of the database engine, but rather running one database with different data sets. You don't say what platform you're running on, either, but I suppose it doesn't really matter.
> 1) Will the database become corrupt if, for example, the > person running
either the C program, or the report writer, > perhaps in background, kills the job?

Absolutely not, under any circumstances. The database will automatically roll back the transactions, and the data will remain consistent.
> 2) How much of a performance hit will occur (say, on an
> SGI Indigo, w/ 80M) if the C program is inserting data,
> and the report writer is running a report (on unrelated
> data)? Will it take twice as long, or only 10% or less?

This depends largely on how the database was set up, your platform, and whether or not the database was set up by an idiot. On a well-tuned system, I have seen negligible performance degradations (an apparent 0%) -- on badly tuned, slow systems, I have seen larger apparent figures. Bear in mind that Oracle's performance degradation curve is inherently linear.

> 3) How easily does an Oracle db get corrupted (say, if three
> or four people are running report writers at the same time)?

You have a better chance of winning the lottery without buying a ticket. Oracle databases do NOT get corrupted because people access them. The only Oracle databases I have seen corrupted (I have repaired many) is because somebody screws up in a big way at the OS level -- e.g. deleting key files, physically corrupting the files, attempting to access the files directly, etc.

Michael Stowe
Director of Technical Services
Constellation Engineering Received on Thu Mar 03 1994 - 08:17:00 CET