Re: Oracle Administration Requirements

From experience I can tell you that Progress and Oracle are very much different beasts.
We have them here and I am the DBA for the 2.

How much administration required depends on many things, one of which is: how much in-house development will you be doing, or how frequent upgrades will you be performing on your application.

If the application is pretty much stable, and also the number of users connectig to it, then you will have some tuning to do at first, then you will mostly have to deal with issues like tables growing in size etc. There is always some maintenance tasks to be done and some can be automated (you just need to monitor that those jobs perform well as expected).

If you do a lot of modifications to the application, you will need to be more proactive and that may require someone full time.

Finally, there are more things in Oracle that can be tuned, than there are with Progress. That may be a reason why people tend to do a little more administration on Oracle. But if everything runs to your satisfaction and things don't change a lot, and you don't have needs for high-tech stuff (you don't use any of the "special" features in Oracle - only plain tables with b-tree indexes) you can reduce that to a minimum.

-- 
Syltrem

OpenVMS 7.3-1 + Oracle 8.1.7.4
http://pages.infinit.net/syltrem (OpenVMS related web site, en français)
---zulu is not in my email address---
"Jn" <jnethercutt_at_wehco.com> a écrit dans le message de
news:31eabe4d.0401200608.4df2723d_at_posting.google.com...


> We are considering a new software application which uses the Oracle

> database.  Our company has had no prior experience with Oracle - we've

> used Progress on Unix for the past 14 years and Informix on Unix for

> the past 2 years, so we do have RDBMS experience.  My question is -

> how does the database administration requirements of Oracle differ

> from that of Progress and/or Informix?  I keep reading in other posts

> of the high administration cost of Oracle relative to other databases.

>  Can anyone elaborate on that?   Will we need someone full time

> serving as the Oracle DBA?  I know that we will need staff with Oracle

> database knowledge/skills - my question is - is administering the

> Oracle database / environment a full time activity?

>

> The application will have about 75 users, a production and test

> server/database of approximately 40GB each, running on Windows 2000

> servers.

>

> Thanks in advance,

> jn