Oracle Snapshots & Replication

We are a very new Oracle shop and do not have a lot of experience using Oracle. I know that all the glossys, literature etc. say that replication & snapshots using Oracle work wonderful but I'm looking for real life, technical direction on this one. We pretty well need a guarantee that if we try to do this, it WILL WORK. If there is any doubt, we will re-examine our alternatives.

We are in the process of deciding which platform we would like to implement a corporate Oracle database and there are some concerns regarding the limitations or implications of trying to use multiple platforms and their access to a central database.

The scenario is that we have a database on a System 9 of which we want to either take snapshots of or use replication on. The snapshots or replications will reside on Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and possibly HP HP-UX platforms.

If anyone can provide any information from experiences they have had in successfully implementing either of these features within a multi-platform environment (or not) I'd appreciate their comments.

• What are some of the implications in trying to do this (keeping in mind the concern with the different platforms) ?
• Versions of Oracle ?
• Versions of SQL*Net ?
• Versions of Solaris, AIX or HP-UX ?
• Network traffic/bottlenecks ?
• Network operating systems ?
• Are there any other sites that are currently using these features successfully in a production multi-platform environment ?

We've recently ran into problems using full database snapshots with this database because of the size of the tables. We found that they took an excessive amount of time & resources to run and ended up simply doing manual export/imports of the database. Is this an issue that has occured with other sites ?

We also have all kinds of questions as to how this implementation should be designed as far as using snapshots vs replication vs database links but I think that that can be worked out later on unless we should be addressing this up front. Should we be worrying about the whole design including the platform or does the platform really make that much difference ?

Our biggest question right now is if we are using different platforms will cause us more grief than staying within the the most common platform ???(Which is currently Sun Solaris)

I hope this isn't totally confusing. I'd appreciate any information from anyone who has had some experience with using these features. Thanks muchly,
Sue Trombley Received on Mon May 15 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST