Re: Oracle 8 on NT

My previous job was DBA at an Energy Distribution Company. We had a

• Human Resource System (10 users)
• SAP Financial System (40-50 users)
• Various In-house Systems (100+ users)
• Data warehouse system (100+ users)
• FileNet Document Management System (40 users)
• TRIM Records Management System (10 users)

All of these where built using Oracle 8.0.5 on NT4 SP4 & SP5. With several of these DB's we decide to move from Digital UNIX / Oracle 7.3.2 64bit Edition to Intel NT/Oracle 8.0.5. This was so we could consolidate on the OS across the organisation. We needed alot more RAM & Dual CPU's to get the performance out of the 32bit Edition of NT/Oracle. But once we made the move user could not notice any difference in application performance. We actually got performance gains with the data warehouse, most likely due to a better hard drive system (Mylex extreme RAID 32Mb cache), and greater NIC band-width due to the fact we used Intel load balance NI Cards - 3-NIC*100MBps = 300MBps full-duplex.

We decide to use 8.0.5 instead of 8.1.5 on the recommendation of the Gartner Consultancy Group.
Their justification was maturity of 8.0.5 product - usually means less problems. We also had no need for Java functionality therefore this was another factor on choosing the older Oracle product.

I found the Oracle RDBMS to be very stable. One of the most important aspect was the sizing & tuning of the SGA and Rollback segments, otherwise you could almost class Oracle as admin free, especially once you have set the DB's up correctly. Another important factor (for disk speed/contention) was to divide your index structures and data structures into separate tablespaces. These tablespaces related to separate physical OS files that need to be placed on separate drives. In all but one DB system we utilised the 5 drive arrangement as spec'd by OFA. This allows you to divide RBS, Data, Indexes, Logs, Temp tablespace on to seperate drives.

These DB's where installed on a variety of SMP Hardware platforms. Compaq 6000 & 7000 series
Acer 21000 series (best bang for bucks config, approx $15K cheaper than equiv Compaq)
Acer 1100 series

We had a variety of backups including Hot Backups, this appeared to run OK, but to be honest we never had to restore, due to the reliability of the hardware platform and quality of the apps. We had a few power outages (how embarrassing) but NT & Oracle systems seemed to manage those crashes with no intervention from an operator.

In general Oracle & NT was a sound/solid combination.

I have now moved to a new role working with MS-SQL7 and NT. This RDBMS enviro seems to be just as robust and functionally equivalent however to date I am leaning toward NT/Oracle combination as my personal preference. You have far greater choice with Oracle, on which OS you want to deploy and on which hardware platform you can use.

Regards Peter Winters

goofnut <goofnut_member_at_newsguy.com> wrote in message news:85dkde$14dv_at_drn.newsguy.com...
>
> Hi there,
>
> I am trying to find if anyone has any experience dealing with Oracle 8
running
> on Windows NT. I would like to know how reliable it is when there are
about
> 200 user connections and hot backups being done every night.We need to
have an
> uptime of at least 99.985% and I was wondering if it is even possible with
> Oracle running on NT.
>
> Please email your comments to gan_lawrence_at_prc.com.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
Received on Mon Jan 10 2000 - 18:13:00 CST