Oracle 10g: First Impressions

To Educate and Inform the Members of the Central Florida Oracle Users Group

Copyright, 2004 Paul D. Phillips

Introduction
Introduction RAC Implementation

New Features
Questions??

The Current Environment

Two 9.2.0.5 databases and instances: 1) a production instance using 8 GB of memory and a 650 GB database System and 2) a stage instance using .5 GB of memory and 100 GB database Three 10.2.0.1 instances and two databases: 1) a development instance using 1.5 GB of memory and 200 GB database and 2) two RAC clustered instances using .5 GB of memory and a shared 150 GB database

RAC on 10g Implementation

Needed to get our WEB users off the production Batch System ( license and performance issues )
Tasked to do it this way due to funding challenges and on Win 2K Bought 500 GB Disk Array off EBay (~ $2K) Built 2 white box PCs w/ 1 2.6 Ghz CPU (2 CPU motherboard,) 1 GB Memory, ~ $2K each GB NIC cards, Raid SCSI controllers, GB Mini switch for ~ $2K Total: about $9K

RAC on 10g (cont)

Challenges: SCSI cards had to be Cluster aware
Went through 4 sets of cards

Array had 14 drives, 1 array controller and 2 SCSI cards; needed 17 SCSI ids
You can only have 16 per device Had to unplug 2 drives array now has 210GB of SAME storage

RAC on 10g (cont)

Installed Cluster Ready Services on C:\ drive of both systems automatically with one install Smooth install, no problems, nice
Array came up Clustered and shared

RAC on 10g (cont)

Installed Oracle 10g on Cluster disk in private partition for software
Only takes ~ 1 GB

Took < 40 minutes

Installer seems to be finally getting to the point it needs to be Overall install experience: Very Positive

RAC on 10g (cont): Current issues

Cant get Failover to work at all (is now working)
Cant get Load Balancing to work consistently (is now working) Have been working with Oracle for nearly 2 weeks, about 30 hours total Documentation is either wrong or missing Problem: Not a lot on 10g in the online Notes and Docs, period

10g New Features

On 9i, there were 9 system processes
On 10g, there are 14 (in Win 2K) Need more Memory for basic Oracle processes Need to investigate all the automatic processes, defaults are probably too aggressive

10g New Features (cont)

New: SYSAUX tablespace
Holds all the non DD stuff, such as Automated Workload Repository, XML schemas, example schemas etc. About the same size as the SYSTEM tablespace

10g New Features (cont)

New Space related features
Tablespace Groups: Combines multiple Temporary Tablespaces into one pool for the whole database (Group can be the Default Tablespace) Rename Tablespace: when transporting tablespaces, eliminates name conflicts

10g New Features (cont)

Shrink Tables: Online, in-place table defrag:
ALTER TABLE tablename SHRINK SPACE CASCADE; - docs claim cascade is for related objects and optional, but it would not work without it on a stand alone table; but when it does work, it works well NOTE: Must ALTER TABLE tablename ENABLE ROW MOVEMENT; first Automatic UNDO works!

10g New Features (cont)

More Automation: The Automated Workload Repository Note: AWR runs hourly by default on Win2K; report is similar to statspack but with more info (even some OS!); claims to be self cleaning Very excited about this feature, with new events, new v$ views and just more info We may finally be to the point of being able to know the database and tune to what we know

10g New Features (cont)

Server Based Advisors use the Automated Workload Repository
Automated Database Diagnostic Monitor: runs as advertised Can not yet speak to the value of the recommendations New packages are DBMS_ADVISOR and DBMS_SQL_TUNE

10g New Features (cont)

Other Automation:
Automated Shared Memory Management (SGA) Self-tuning Checkpointing (fast_start_mttr_target)

Better Trace Functionality( DBMS_MONITOR ) Can not yet speak to these new features

10g New Features (cont)

RMAN:
The Block Change Tracking File a bit map of all changed blocks Maintained as part of the redo process; speeds incremental backups Compressed Backup sets ( anecdotal reports of 80 % compression )

10g New Features (cont)

Data Pump:
An internalized version of EXP and IMP Run as a job

Can detach from the database and check back later on the process; can restart, specify parallelism and support for network mode ops, which use a database link
Will extract metadata, data or both

10g New Features (cont)

Oracle Enterprise Manager:
Much improved from a speed and stability standpoint Middle tier, Oracle Management Server, is now J2EE Wanted to try Database Control, but have not had time to install the repository We saw the demo last month

Conclusion
Overall rating: A May change when we go to our production system (many unusual features used, such as VLM, Partitioned Compressed IOTs and large dependence on parallel processing: BUGS!?) Unless otherwise indicated, plan to upgrade in September; motivation is to get off 9.2.0.5 Questions????