Re[2]: Little competition

Thursday, December 11, 2003, 8:44:25 AM, Mercadante, Thomas F (thomas.mercadante_at_labor.state.ny.us) wrote: MTF> And I think a condensed documentation set is a great MTF> idea. I wonder if there is a market for it?

If I just wrote the book? No, I doubt it would sell in high-enough numbers. The Oracle book market is much too soft now to take a risk on a niche title.

But if I could convince Oracle to buy into the book, well, then it'd be a different story. Oracle has done a lot to make their database simpler to manage (under the right circumstances), but I haven't seen where they've pulled everything together into a simplified management paradigm
(sorry for that buzzword) that they can present to
customers. Just what is "the simple way" to manage Oracle? I don't think that's been well-defined, and I think it could be well-defined.

First, you'd need to somehow define what a "simpfilied Oracle environment" looks like. I don't know how to do this yet. For the sake of argument, let's peg it as:

    Less than 100GB of data, 100 users or less, TCP/IP only,     some downtime each day is acceptable, no need for fancy     recoveries such as tablespace-point-in-time.

I don't think the above is quite enough of a definition, but run with it for a bit. Given the above, think about the tasks a DBA needs to perform:

Backup/recovery - Lot's of options here, but who cares? Can we define a simple regime that works? Run in archive log mode, use RMAN to do a full backup once/week, run incremental backups each night, documented and simple instructions to recover from: loss of control file, loss of log file, loss of datafile. No fancy scenarios. Just assume that everything is always to be recovered to the point of failure.

Startup/shutdown - ?

Creating a tablespace - Use automatic space management, automatic extent sizing, automatic datafile extension. Just issue CREATE TABLESPACE XXX, and let Oracle figure everything else out.

Creating a table - Show how to create a table and define constraints, how to create simple indexes, ignore storage options (let them be automatic), ignore partitioning, ignore the object features, ignore index storage parameters, ignore PCTFREE/PCTUSED, etc.

Creating a database - Use dbca, check all the options for automatic space management, automatic everything else, probably need to decide on a pool of disks for Oracle to use for datafiles.

Moving a table to another database - Define one way that will work good-enough given the size parameters.

Moving a schema to another database - ditto. define one way that works.

I'm not sure what else. The idea would be to produce a very task-oriented manual that covered the subset of tasks necessary to operate in the simplified environment. It'd be something to give to technical person not familiar with Oracle, and it should be enough to let that person create and manage a database in the simplified environment.

Best regards,

Jonathan Gennick --- Brighten the corner where you are http://Gennick.com * 906.387.1698 * mailto:jonathan@gennick.com

Join the Oracle-article list and receive one article on Oracle technologies per month by email. To join, visit http://four.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/oracle-article, or send email to Oracle-article-request_at_gennick.com and include the word "subscribe" in either the subject or body.

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Jonathan Gennick
  INET: jonathan_at_gennick.com

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L


(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may

also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).