Re: Oracle Support and Porting for the OpenVMS Platform

I have been involved for just over a year with an Open VMS / Alpha environment where we have had the joy of a quite stable system combined with issues in some areas concerning performance.
Disks seem to be a contentious area wherever you are, we have RAID5 for the database, and the system, the redo-logs, the exports and archives are now on non-RAID. I'm still finding problems believing the results of performance from our shadow machine which is an identical Alpha running OSF.

The example is to spool an ascii file from a basic select, not using the indexes
on a table with over one million rows, selecting a set of info approx 60% of table.
On the Open VMS machine running archiving, on-line live system, writing to a non-RAID device - 6 hours!
On the OSF machine the same select on the same table took less than 30 minutes!!

I still have to run some more tests to confirm this is as I see it, but it is confirmed by one of my colleagues. The thing is that we have gone through all the tuning possible on VMS and Oracle7 to no avail. We appear to be running an almost perfect system, albeit with minor issues outstanding!

As regards Oracle support for VMS, all I can say is that when you've tried our support group here in Italy please give me a call and tell me your thoughts - I can't put mine in writing!

David Phizacklea
DBA
Serco Servizi
Frascati
dphizack_at_mail.esrin.esa.it Received on Tue Feb 13 1996 - 00:00:00 CET