Re: Oracle memory allocation on Linux 2.6

On Apr 3, 10:28 am, Mladen Gogala <mgog..._at_yahoo.com> wrote:

> I believe that the root of the evil is in the crusade against expensive
> administrators. DBA personnel, as well as system administrators are
> considered "expensive" and disliked by the modern management. Just as
> there is a tendency to cut the number of expensive workers in automobile
> industry, there is also a tendency to replace everybody by "business
> professionals", people programming with Hibernate and Tapestry for
> WebLogic or JBoss, knowing next to nothing about databases or the
> underlying OS. That's the real spirit of Windows platform, as well as the
> Linux platform. If I understand the business correctly, what is wanted is
> the system that can be used and administered by Elbonians. Fortunately for
> us, the effect is precisely the opposite. Oracle11 is the most complex
> database to date and Linux 2.6 is the most problems-prone Linux version
> ever. You need better administrators than ever, fewer and fewer are up to
> the task. I will not shed a tear over a demise of Linux, when that
> happens. However, don't be mistaken: the industry will succeed,
> eventually. They succeeded in the automobile industry, there is no reason
> to doubt the progress and the prospect of the ultimate victory for idiots.
> HAL 9000 awaits us.

While I sympathize with your statement, I do not fully agree. It is true that appreciation for well trained, smart people that know how to do their job (and more) seems to be declining. This is sad and I dislike that tendency as I prefer to do a good job over having a job.

It is also true that too many people develop applications with too little background - especially on databases. I find it particularly distressful that OR mappers are so prevalent nowadays because they hide away database details from the application - which is good in a way, because it leads to separation of concerns - but at the same time hides important aspects such as transactions, when data is read from the database and when from memory, how to best pool accesses to minimize DB round trips etc. This almost automatically (!) leads to bad performance.

The point where I disagree is when you turn down improvements in management automation. Basically systems become more complex all the time and we also learn more about system behavior. It is much more efficient to try to put that knowledge in code than to train a lot of people to do the same. The Java Virtual Machines of today are an extremely good example of where this can lead - performance has much improved over earlier versions and this is because the JVM is "intelligent" enough to do optimizations on the running code.

My 0.02 EUR...

Kind regards

robert Received on Thu Apr 03 2008 - 08:17:23 CDT