I am a software developer and we are probaly moving our application to
Oracle (i.e. the Oracle DBMS server). I have been using Oracle in a
development environment for a while and I think I understand the basics
pretty well. However, I have not yet any experience administrating an
Oracle database.
I am interested hearing how much work it is to administrate an Oracle
database compared to MS SQL Server and Btrieve (Pervasive SQL). One of
Pervasives selling points is that you don't have to do any
administration.
Most of our clients are pretty small (up to about 50 users) and they will
have no Oracle knowledge so we have to deal with everything with the
server (excpet for running the backups).
When I talk to other developers (who are not using Oracle, those how are
into Client/Server use Btrieve or MS SQL Server) the opinion about Oracle
is:
- It is expensive
- It is complex, hard to install and understand.
- Requires a lot of administration to keep it running.
My answer to this is:
- Oracle is not that expensive, at least if you are not using Enterprise
Edition (which is VERY expensive). It is priced about the same as other
databases (an Oracle runtime license is even cheaper than Btrieve)
- Ok, it is harder than copying some Access files to a directory but as
with any advanced software you have to invest some time learning it. And
I don't think Oracle is much more complicated than for example SQL Server
(I have only experience with ver 2/4.2) when you get behind the scenes. I
have learned Oracle by reading books, manuals and playing around with it
and I don't think Oracle is that hard to learn.
- Administration: I am not so sure about that but I don't see that is
that much work. As I see it there are the following areas which you have
to take care of:
- Tuning. Of course, if you want to get maxiumum performance out of the
database you perhaps have to do a lot of tweaking. But maybe that is not
necessary. After doing a couple of installations and have been running
the app for some while you would have som experience of which tuning
parameters you have to tweak and could use this for all installations.
- Backup/Recovery (this area is what I find hardest to understand). A
one-time configuration for setting up a backup procedure.
- Add/remove user accounts. Would not be necessary with a single logon
- Change/add tables.
- Solving problems with row migration/fragementation: (export-import?) I
guess this can be taken care of once or twice each year when we update
the software. is this a problem with SQL Server/Btrieve as well?
- Managing growth of table spaces. Can be a headache if you are exceeding
max extents or running out of diskspace. But why not set max extents to
unlimited? You might want to re-create the table spaces after a while to
minimize the number of extents, but that can be taken care when doing
other upgrades of the software.
- Installing on new hardware: Doesn't happen that often.
Have I forgotten some important task for a DBA? Comments? What are you
DBAs spending your time on?
Magnus
Received on Fri Jun 04 1999 - 10:04:23 CDT
