RE: What is a large database?

I think there are many *poorly skilled* Oracle DBA's in Australia.

I had one of my clients sugest increasing the Oracle log_buffer to 10MB. His claim is since the box has sufficient amount of memory "why not use a very large log buffer".
I do not think he reads the oracle docs very well and he knows when LGWR writes to the redo log files.

This was after I recommended changing an Oracle system disk configuration from RAID 5 ( 4 disks)
which includes the Windows OS on the same RAID 5 array to using a RAID 1 for the OS
and multiple standalone and RAID 1 disks for Oracle. Sugesting RAID 1 and standalone disks since there
are not enough disks that can fit into the array. Client does not want to spend $$$ so they have only
a 5 disk array that we could use for Oracle.

Surpising enough the write cache on the disk array was set to 0 and 100% for the read cache on this particular
RAID 5 system which does lots of small writes for the application making things even worse.

The DBA also sugested "but the BCHR is 99.7% which means that blah , blah , blah and in Oracle terms performance is very good".

It could be clearly seen from the Windows performance monitors and statspack that the IO sub system
was being stressed and the only way to improve performance was to re arrange the disks to reduce the
contention between the various processes contending for IO resources. And get rid of the RAID 5 configuration.

Another thing that came up in my furious conversation with them was "but the disks has enough capacity blah blah blah, why do we need additional disks".

I had to explain the concepts of RAID and how bad RAID 5 is for write performance esp when the datafiles, redo logs, archives, control files and OS is on the same RAID 5 array.

No offense to any Oracle DBA in Australia as we all know there are some excellent DBA's here like Connor, Steve, Mark Gurry, Guy Harrison, Nuno Sunto, Howard Rogers, etc, etc....

Anyway that was some humour I thought I should share with the list since we were on the topic of talented DBA's in Australia.

Regards
Suhen

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, 23 September 2003 1:55 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Hi,

Do you really think the standard of database administrators in Australia is low? What is it that you are expecting?

Cheers,
Craig.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, 12 September 2003 8:59 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

you should send them over to Australia. At least they'd be better than the standard of "dba" we get here... Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optusnet.com.au
----- Original Message -----

> In Estonian language, the word "administrator" also means receptionist.
> Guess how many former hotel receptionists or whatever security desk
> operators I've had to turn down in past when they've looked for DBA job.
Oh,
> yes, some of them had over 20 years administrator experience in large
> organizations, also lots of experience with 24x7 operations etc ;)
>

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Author: Suhen Pather
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