Nov
16
Written by:
Bert
Friday, November 16, 2007 10:41 AM
This blog posting is not meant to demean or slander the Oracle database in anyway. I’ve staked almost my entire career on Oracle technologies – and I intend to finish these last 7-10 years doing more Oracle stuff. To quote a funny Saturday Night Live skit: “Oracle has been very, very good to me.” So my comments are more about how “uninformed” installation of the latest Oracle release on a notebook could lead to negative surprises.
Now we’ve all heard or participated in the “water-cooler” discussions about how each new release of any software package seems to require more CPU, memory, disk or all three. Oracle is no different – some people for example might say that 8.1.7 was their favorite release in terms of features versus performance. So it should come as no shock that Oracle 11g requires a little more resources than its predecessors – that’s simply the normal cost of progress in the software world.
But we’ve become quite spoiled by Oracle over the past decade (which is a good thing). I remember when there was no Oracle for the PC – because the DOS version was not really Oracle in its full glory if you ask me. Then it came out on IBM OS/2, and eventually for Microsoft Windows. So now we had full blown Oracle that could run on our desktop or notebooks – and life was grand. When Oracle’s Technology Network (OTN) first came out – I gladly paid $200 per platform for the software. Then wonderfully, Oracle made the OTN downloads totally free (within certain guidelines) – and life was grander still.
On the technical side, there was a time when the only way I’d create a database was via my own hand-written SQL scripts. But over the years the Oracle database has become so complex in terms of options that writing such scripts became inefficient. Fortunately at the very same time, the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) has become so good that I rarely write my own scripts anymore – especially for RAC deployments, where DBCA is much quicker and better than I could even aspire to be.
But now these very factors: database is free for limited use (i.e. on your PC) and DBCA is good enough for creating databases – it’s been easy to miss the fact that the database software has a lot more options we should make conscience decisions about. What I mean is that we no longer can start up DBCA to create a database, and then mindlessly press the “Next” button until it starts working. That may have been acceptable and safe back with 8i, but 11g is definitely a different animal. So people should carefully navigate the DBCA screens and options – and feel free to choose to disable or change significant items if deploying Oracle on a notebook or desktop with limited resources.
Here are just a few examples of why I strongly recommend cautiously navigating and selecting from DBCA (many items listed below are generally not really needed all the time or very conducive to use on non-production systems with limited IO bandwidth):
-
11g now defaults to auditing turned on and stored in the database
-
DBCA defaults to installing Java Virtual Machine and XML DB
-
DB multi file read count seems to default to a much higher value
-
File system IO options defaults to NONE – wish it would just choose SETALL
-
Job queue processes now defaults to 1000 instead of 10 – that’s a very big change
-
There are more pre-supplied Oracle jobs to actually really do self-maintenance
-
Max dump file size still defaults to UNLIMITED – never a good choice for PC’s
-
XML DB Events default to ENABLED – since default is now to install XML DB
-
Recycle BIN still defaults to ON – and thus people potentially collecting junk
-
SGA now has some additional new areas: Results Cache, Function Cache, etc.
I could go on – but just the above should be sufficient for most people to see that when creating an Oracle database on a smaller machine (like a notebook), it’s clearly best not to just blindly accept the DBCA defaults anymore. When done properly, I’ve been able to run 10g, 11g and a two node 10g RAC cluster all on my Windows XP notebook without any major headaches. Even when running them all concurrently!