Help an Oracle newbie out

  • Resender (1/7/2011)


    today i spend trying to figure out why the laptop i'm working on slowed down seriously in the past 24 hours the best answer i can think off atm is that the demand by 2 or more oracle databases is to much

    I have both SQL Server Express and Oracle XE running on my PC at work and also my laptop at home. Most of the time I'm not using my local instances anyhow, so I don't need them running. I configured the Startup Type for all of the database services to "Manual" instead of "Automatic", so they don't automatically start running when I boot up. You can view the status of the services, stop them, and change their Startup Type under Computer Management.. Services. When I'm finished using them, I'll even stop the service.

    Also, both SQL Server XE and Oracle XE have an upper limit of 1 GB memory, but I have re-configured them both on my local PC to have a maximum of 250 MB. When running queries, both of these services will cache up pages and hold them in memory until it reaches the limit, because that's what database servers do, but most PCs and laptops are designed for running MS Office and browsing the web. SSMS, Toad, and Oracle SQL Developer will also consume a lot of memory if you select large resulsets, so close worksheets or close the applications when you're done with them. They'll chew up your resources in no time, if you don't watch them and keep them on a short leash.

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • The laptop has 3.8 GB of workable RAM, I configured the EXAMPLE(orlc) database to ma manual, I replaced the one I intend to use for testing and exercises with one that only has a pool of 500MB

    The reason I looked so far is that I thought a failed Virtual Machine was still running in the background

  • Resender (1/7/2011)


    The laptop has 3.8 GB of workable RAM, I configured the EXAMPLE(orlc) database to ma manual, I replaced the one I intend to use for testing and exercises with one that only has a pool of 500MB

    The reason I looked so far is that I thought a failed Virtual Machine was still running in the background

    That may be the reason. A mostly idle single 500Meg SGA Oracle instance running on a 3.8 Gig machine shouldn't have such a negative impact on performance.

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.
  • Having worked as a SQL Server DBA/Developer for over 12 years and finding myself on the Dark Side now, I have learned one important thing: Learning Oracle as a developer is a lot easier than learnign Oracle as a DBA. Luckily we have dedicated oracle DBAs where I work so I don't need to learn that side of Oracle (yet).

    I have found many simularities betwwen the twom but also many differences.

    One difference, an empty string in Oracle is treated as a NULL. This messed me up while helping another developer with a NOT IN query as I tried a simple SQL Server response to this one and it didn't work. Instead of an empty string, I had to use a single space (' ').

    The last 5 months have been an interesting journey. I am enjoying the opportunity to learn Oracle, but the more I work with it the more I'd like to come back to SQL Server.

  • Lynn Pettis (1/8/2011)


    ...

    The last 5 months have been an interesting journey. I am enjoying the opportunity to learn Oracle, but the more I work with it the more I'd like to come back to SQL Server.

    While this can technically be done with SQL Server too, it's rare. However, it's far more common amoung Oracle DBAs ...

    <sarcasm>Don't you just love it when the Oracle DBA chooses to set the database collation to Case Sensitive??</sarcasm>

    Ewww! NOT!!!

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • Lynn Pettis (1/8/2011)


    I have found many simularities between the two (SQL Server and Oracle) but also many differences.

    This is because of these are two independent, totally different implementations of the same underlying relational theory 😉 - In evolutional terms I would say they are cousin species which departed from the same ancestor long time ago.

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.
  • Lynn Pettis (1/8/2011)


    I am enjoying the opportunity to learn Oracle, but the more I work with it the more I'd like to come back to SQL Server.

    Agreed. Fortunately I still work with SQL Server.

    When I started to work with Oracle I thought that my hate was due to lack of knowledge, but now that I know it much better, I hate it even more.

    -- Gianluca Sartori

  • I don't hate the oracle, I think we're just spoiled by MS SQL Severs which seem to have an easy/straightfoward tools to manage and create databases.

    However we must try to keep an open mind in order to become less dependant on MS and their sometimes inexplicable twists in logic (e.g MS Vista compared to MS XP)

  • Gianluca Sartori (1/10/2011)


    Lynn Pettis (1/8/2011)


    I am enjoying the opportunity to learn Oracle, but the more I work with it the more I'd like to come back to SQL Server.

    Agreed. Fortunately I still work with SQL Server.

    When I started to work with Oracle I thought that my hate was due to lack of knowledge, but now that I know it much better, I hate it even more.

    May be you just realized that the size of what you call "lack of knowledge" is much larger than anticipated 😀

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.
  • PaulB-TheOneAndOnly (1/12/2011)


    Gianluca Sartori (1/10/2011)


    Lynn Pettis (1/8/2011)


    I am enjoying the opportunity to learn Oracle, but the more I work with it the more I'd like to come back to SQL Server.

    Agreed. Fortunately I still work with SQL Server.

    When I started to work with Oracle I thought that my hate was due to lack of knowledge, but now that I know it much better, I hate it even more.

    May be you just realized that the size of what you call "lack of knowledge" is much larger than anticipated 😀

    Ah! I wish it was like that, Paul!

    I've been working on SQL Server for ten years and come across 4 or 5 bugs.

    It's less than one year since I'm working on Oracle and I already found at least 10 bugs. Having them fixed is a pain. Opening Service Requests means uploading tons of traces and the like, waiting weeks and weeks for an answer, seeing the dev team refusing to fix the problem, going back to support, restart from scratch with them, going back to dev team again, .... and so on infinitively.

    If they ever decide to give you a fix, half of the times it doesn't even install.

    The client tools shipped with the product are really poor. SQL*Plus is the only tool to perform lots of tasks. Command line tools???? Come on, we're in 2011!!!

    Enterprise Manager is so buggy that even Oracle trainers recommend not to use it. I agree with them.

    SQL Developer is nice, but horribly slow.

    OUI sometimes crashes without messages or logs.

    Should I buy a third-party tool like Toad? Probably, but I wonder why I should spend money on another tool when I paid a whole lot of money (far more that SQL Server) for my Oracle software.

    And I could add lots of other little annoying things.

    I'm not saying Oracle is a piece of crap, I'm just saying that it bothers me in many little annoying ways. When I said "now that I know it much better, I hate it even more" I meant that many times I was hoping that existed a better way to do things, just to discover there was not.

    Just my two cents, as usual.

    -- Gianluca Sartori

  • Gianluca Sartori (1/13/2011)


    ... SQL*Plus is the only tool to perform lots of tasks. Command line tools???? Come on, we're in 2011!!!

    Let me start by saying that every single point you have made - including the ones I didn't quote... are absolutely true! 😀

    Welcome to the wonderful world of Oracle! Let me tell you how I adapted to it.

    1- Forget about GUI tools, both Unix (any flavour) and Oracle like it better when you touch them with your bare hands so... use command line.

    2- In the Oracle world a DBA has an extra responsibility which is not so apparent in SQL Server, that responsibility is to keep the environment as stable as possible - that means change control, extensive testing and always have the ability to backout changes.

    Do not missunderstand me, I use some GUI tools like DBArtisan - which comes handy to have SQL Server, Sybase and Oracle on a fairly standard similar format - and OEM but, I use those tools only against small or very small (Oracle) databases and never, ever against a production one.

    May I say that those are my two cents? 🙂

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.
  • PaulB-TheOneAndOnly (1/13/2011)


    ...

    Do not missunderstand me, I use some GUI tools like DBArtisan - which comes handy to have SQL Server, Sybase and Oracle on a fairly standard similar format - and OEM but, I use those tools only against small or very small (Oracle) databases and never,

    ever against a production one.

    ...

    I context switch between SQL Server (the reporting database) and Oracle (the data warehouse), and I frequently use the Oracle SQL Developer GUI for development on both. SQL Developer is Java based, so the app takes a couple minutes to load, but it responds OK after that.

    As for DBAs, whatever PL/SQL or T-SQL commands, scripts, etc. that you run are usually canned or parameter driven, so having a GUI tool with full schema drilldown, text editing, and code completion is not needed.

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • OK in the past 72 hours I had 2 major successes involving oracle 11g

    1)Working Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise on a SUSE Linux 11 SP1

    2)Using SSIS to pump data from Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise 32-bit database

    to a SQL Server 2008 64-bit database and vice versa.

    I completed the OCA book and I'm confident that with the practice I'll be getting in the coming months

    I'll be able to handle it.

    Now I'm on the OCP book, which involves things I really should/want be able to do.

    However my problem starts at page 1 of the first chapter of the book with the Automatic Storage Management.

    The book says to start up the dbca and choose the ASM option, but i see no ASM option.

    The rman utility as well runs into errors.

    Anyone had experiance with this. (I will be asking this on the oracle forums as well, just waiting for my forum activation)

  • Resender (1/20/2011)


    OK in the past 72 hours I had 2 major successes involving oracle 11g

    1)Working Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise on a SUSE Linux 11 SP1

    2)Using SSIS to pump data from Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise 32-bit database

    to a SQL Server 2008 64-bit database and vice versa.

    I completed the OCA book and I'm confident that with the practice I'll be getting in the coming months

    I'll be able to handle it.

    Now I'm on the OCP book, which involves things I really should/want be able to do.

    However my problem starts at page 1 of the first chapter of the book with the Automatic Storage Management.

    The book says to start up the dbca and choose the ASM option, but i see no ASM option.

    The rman utility as well runs into errors.

    Anyone had experiance with this. (I will be asking this on the oracle forums as well, just waiting for my forum activation)

    I'll suggest not to try to eat the whole cow in a single sitting.

    Get familiar with Oracle, learn what is different.

    ASM and RMAN are two very different animals.

    ASM is Oracle's propietary storage system - it provides near raw device performance and it is prety efficient and reliable but, it requires a lot of reading and testing - don't expect to master it in a day ... or week ... or better saying a couple of month either.

    To take advantage of ASM you first have to create your ASM environment then deploy your instances on top of it.

    RMAN is Oracle's recovey manager, a fantastic backup and recovery tool but as it happens with ASM it is a project on itself.

    Point is, I've seen pretty good production support DBAs that actually have very little knowledge of either ASM or RMAN. I agree, the whole package is better but do not try to do everything at the same time.

    Hope this helps.

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.

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