Re: a sad story for Oracle DBAs

Money drives it all, doesn't it?

I am finishing up a 3 month consultancy with a credit card company (which was to have been perpetual 3 month contracts but I pleaded for no more).

The business owners constantly try to talk their way out of paying for the disk space and CPU time Oracle uses, claiming that this cost should be borne by the DBA group, as it's not their resposibility what Oracle chews up in resources.

I have spent a month trying to tune queries in an area so tight that Oracle has no choice but choose Nested Loops over Sorted Joins because there is no space. Though parallel query option is installed, the degree in indexes and tables is set to one and the pfifle defaults to no parallel queries. The reason? No room. Now I wish I could charge what Oracle charges. But at a fraction of their rate, the business owners could have done better by buying more memory than paying me to try to force a deluge through a soda straw. There's so little room, I have to wait significant periods of times to get data from the data dictionaries, as there's just not enough room for library cache of any significance.

Last Thanksgiving I remember rushing together an instance for the legal department of a major drug company. The manager of the DBA group said he didn't want the legal department to be slowed down in their queries, so he gave me a box with billions and billions of real memory bytes available so full table scans could stay cached in memory if need be.

So you explain the approaches to money. BTW, the instance for the legal department was only needed for a few days to justify some kind of takeover bid.

The e-mail address is bogus. Remove the NoSpam for a real address. Received on Sun Apr 12 1998 - 23:23:19 CDT