Re: Urgent!!! Upgrade Oracle and Hardware question ?

"Howard J. Rogers" <dba_at_hjrdba.com> wrote in message news:<aerk5v$hgl$1_at_lust.ihug.co.nz>...
> You know 8.1.6 is desupported, don't you? So you are moving from one
> desupported version to one slightly less desupported version??

Hm, the only thing agreed from all in this thread. :-)

> Great danger. 8i is to 8.0 what chalk is to cheese. It's more resource
> hungry. The internals got different (otherwise it wouldn't be an upgrade,
> would it?). There are newer and more efficient ways of doing things. And old
> ways of doing things might become slightly more expensive.

I tend to disagree. He told us that they're also upgrading server. I don't know their old server and new one specs are quite uncertain (see below), but with recent progress in server performance I wouldn't expect any performance problem with moving from 8.0.5 to 8.1.7. Yes 8.1.7 is more resource hungry than 8.0.5 (and 9i is also more demanding than 8.1.7), but with properly sized server no problem at all.

> What I tend to recommend is that you clone your database, upgrade the clone,
> and test and test and test until you know the pros and cons. Only then
> consider upgrading the real production database.

Testing is very crucial in migration process, but from my point of few bigger issue is incompatibilities between 8 and 8i behaviour than performance issues.

> > For CPU we will use Dual Dell PowerEdge and We will have 2 GIG RAM but
> > Hard Drive we dont know.
>
> I have shares in Seagate. I recommend (completely unbiasedly, of course)
> Seagate Hard Drives to all my students. Avoid Quantum hard drives as they
> give you veneral disease. IBM hard drives give you Alzheimers. Only Seagate
> hard drives make your teeth pearly white... er, I mean... CUT!... give you
> peace of mind.

I think that he will get a Dell hard drives (usually Seagates with Dell sign on them). He can also choose from 10k or 15k rpm drives. I think that Seagate makes the best SCSIs on market.

> Peanuts. A nice Seagate RAID 0+1 array will do fine. Steer clear of RAID 5
> (it makes the elastic in your underpants disintegrate). Just make sure to
> buy as many hard disks as you can afford (say, 9 minimum, preferably 36).

I think that you're out of pool, chap. He's talking about PowerEdge with 2GB RAM. That doesn't look like external storage will be in place.
Unfortunately he didn't told us which PowerEdge he wants to use and number of internal drive bays is varying from 8 (2500) to 12 (6600). So your 36 is a pretty good, but not applicable number. That was the reason why I (against my conviction)
recomended RAID5 for all data files, because with mirroring (and using 6 drives, 2 for system) he would not have enough place for future needs. From my experiences servers like this are usually equipped with 5x36GB or something like that. Is also a good idea not to fulfill all bays, because of future upgrades.

--
_________________________________________

Dusan Bolek, Ing.
Oracle team leader

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