Oracle 8.0 admin course 2

[ddiamond]

I've been working with oracle 8.0 for about 5 years, but I have not had any formal training in it. I was recently promoted to oracle DBA, so I think a formal admin course will be helpful. The only problem is that all of the oracle courses appear to be for version 10g. Will a 10g admin course still be helpful? How much of what I learn will be applicable to version 8.0? And yes, if I could I'd upgrade to oracle 10g, but for reasons outside of my control, I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
Asking you to be a DBA for a version that is so old and totally unsupported is setting you up for job suicide...

If your company will not upgrade maybe it is time to think about another database system... as much as I hate to say it ( being an Oracle person), maybe SqlServer would be a better choice.[ or even Access]

I doubt you will ever find any courses in 8.0 and 10g training, except for some basic concepts, will be useless.-too much has changed.

There may be some books and maybe even cd-based training materials for that version on EBay...







To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[ddiamond]

If your company will not upgrade maybe it is time to think about another database system... as much as I hate to say it ( being an Oracle person), maybe SqlServer would be a better choice.[ or even Access]

We are in the process of migrating to (gasp!!) DB2, but it will take many years to complete the migration. It has been a slow and painful process. In the mean time, I will still need to admin oracle.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
OK..Try Ebay for older books - and good luck ( you may need it )





To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[Beilstwh]

If your company has paid support, you can upgrade all the way to 10G without cost. If they are running without support, it is just a matter of time until something breaks and your database goes down in flame. How big is your company and how much data is the database storing. Oracle has a version of 10G called express that is free for production use, but can only store a maximum of 4 gig of data. They also have 10G versions that are fairly inexpensive and are made for smaller companies (standard edition). Check out the following line for pricing information.

oraclestore.oracle.com

Bill
Oracle DBA/Developer
New York State, USA

 

[ddiamond]

We are paying for support, but Oracle no longer supports our con-current license agreement. Then want us to upgrade to a per-CPU license, but as long as we stay on oracle 8, oracle is forced to honor our existing lincense. If we upgrade to 10g, however, oracle said we will have to upgrade our license agreement to per-CPU which will initially cost $80k, and then $20k yearly maintenance after that. Our CFO approved the cost, but corporate did not.

 

[Beilstwh]

How many users and how many CPU's on the machine. Depending on the requirements, what they quoted you can be way too much.

Bill
Oracle DBA/Developer
New York State, USA

 

[ddiamond]

Bill,

We currently have 2 CPUs and around 150 users. From what I understand, the CPUs are the only thing that matters with a per CPU license. You have a point, though. I should probably get another quote from oracle since I was not the one who talked to oracle originally, so I don't know what information that quote was based on.

- Dan

 

[Beilstwh]

For such a small site, I would look at standard edition which is MUCH cheaper. See the following link.

http://oraclestore.oracle.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=11470

Bill
Oracle DBA/Developer
New York State, USA

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
In addition, using a Dual Processor machine to handle 150 users is probably overkill..
Buy a single processor server ( you do not mention OS) and install the Standard Version on that...should be no performance problem with sufficient RAM and Disk Space..





To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[ddiamond]

In addition, using a Dual Processor machine to handle 150 users is probably overkill..

We already have performance problems, although I don't think it is related to number of users. We run all of our reports off of oracle. In the case where a single user is running a SLOW report, will multiple CPUs make any difference?

 

[Beilstwh]

You will find that with the newer versions of oracle and the newer servers and processors that are now available, you will not have any performance problems with only 150 users. However, I would use a modern dual processor machine, not a single processor.

Bill
Oracle DBA/Developer
New York State, USA

 

[Beilstwh]

The beauty of oracle is that you can download a fully functioning version of the software and evaluate it before you buy. For example, we have a java application running on an Oracle 8.1.7 machine with 4 processors and we upgraded to the latest version of Linux and oracle 10g with 2 processors and the response went down from 2 minutes for a particular report to 2 seconds without any table changes or code rewrites.

Bill
Oracle DBA/Developer
New York State, USA

 

[ddiamond]

For such a small site, I would look at standard edition which is MUCH cheaper. See the following link.

Bill,
What is the perfomance difference between stand edition one, standard edition, and enterprise edition? As for cost, as long as we are under $25,000, corporate won't get involved. The problem is that corprate has to approve anything over that, and their current policy is to not approve any oracle products.

 

[Beilstwh]

It's not performance that is different between the versions, it is the available options. See the following link.

http://www.oracle.com/database/product_editions.html

Bill
Oracle DBA/Developer
New York State, USA

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,

We already have performance problems, although I don't think it is related to number of users. We run all of our reports off of oracle. In the case where a single user is running a SLOW report, will multiple CPUs make any difference?

It could help if Oracle's reporting tool ( which I have not used in years, we do all our reporting in Crystal Reports) can take advantage of them...
The most likely cause of slow reports ( regardless of tool used) is some inefficiency in the query used to create the dataset needed or in the underlying data model.

That said, given the price for Dual processor boxes, if you are going to buy one, buy a Dual-Processor one - eventually you will need it [ when the performance goes up, so does demand for more]

.








To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[ddiamond]

Bill,

Thanks for the link

http://www.oracle.com/database/product_editions.html.

It looks like the standart one edition has all of the features of Oracle 8.0 enterprise and then some (at the features we currently use). And it would be a cheap option. I'll definately look into it.

- Dan

 

[ddiamond]

The most likely cause of slow reports ( regardless of tool used) is some inefficiency in the query used to create the dataset needed or in the underlying data model.

Turkbear you are correct. Our slow reports are due to slow sql queries. In some cases, poorly written sql is to blame. In other cases, there is simply too much data to be quickly processed and summarized. So in some cases we've been able to improve performance by optimizing the sql. In other cases we've created summary tables that are populated overnight. But I'm sure upgrading to 10g couldn't hurt.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
Probably will help, but not for certain..
The change in outer join Sql syntax from the older non-ANSI form ( using the (+) ) to the current ANSI-compliant ( for example,LEFT OUTER JOIN ON ) syntax may confuse the optimizer if the report's query uses the older syntax..






To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[ddiamond]

I'll keep that in mind. Some of our queries do use the old syntax. Some of our queries also use hints. My guess is that the hints in 10g are different and hopefully not as necessary as the hints in version 8.0.