Workspace Manager Questions

Hello,

I have some Workspace Manager Questions and I'm interested in general opinions/feelings about it. A little bit of background first:

Our database is about 450GB, and we maintain a separate production and development instance. Multiple projects share the same instance, and the same tables, but they have different and overlapping data build and release cycles. When we migrate, we clone the database by putting it in online backup mode, copy the datafiles, and then restore as a new (production) instance. Obviously we're currently only in a position to release/migrate at the lowest common denominator, which creates downtime for the projects with significantly faster build cycles.

We run 9iR2 on SuSE Enterprise.

I'm interested in introducing Oracle's Workspace Manager in hopes of allowing migrations to occur while some projects are still in mid-build, and I'm curious about some of the following issues:

1. Reliability using Workspace Manager
   • Each workspace has the potential to be up to 100 GB large and span several hundred tables.
2. Impact of conducting a migration while a workspace is "open".
   • I assume it wouldn't be a problem-- just extra data to copy, and a little bit of clean up time afterwards in production clearing out the open workspaces?
3. Feasibility of merging a workspace of this size back into the database
   • Fortunately I don't foresee there to be significant conflicts during the merger
4. Best I can tell, the use of Workspace Manager wouldn't require any significant code changes. Is this correct?

Any other "Gotchas" or things I should know about Workspace Manager? Any other opinions or approaches to solving this problem? We're also exploring the possibility of just giving each project its own instance, but there are significant shared data and projects which rely on the data as whole. (And yes, we have explored database links as a solution to this last point).

Thanks much in advance for the insight & wisdom.

--Mike

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Author: Michael Saffitz
  INET: msaffitz_at_pcbi.upenn.edu

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