Oracle fundamentals of a HPUX SA

[Tim Malnati]

Is there a good book out there that discusses in detail all of the need to know information for a HPUX SA dealing with an Oracle environment? Something that includes all the expected things like kernel tuning, disk distribution, communication, etc. Hopefully there is something out there that gets a bit more detailed with stuff like Oracle vs system cache, disk block size strategies, memory utilization, different Oracle releases, and more. I've dealt with some other database engines, so some knowledge I suspect is similar, but it's my understanding that Oracle likes to do a variety of things a little differently. Thanks in advance...

[Shannon Petry]

I have never heard of a book that is specific to Oracle on HP-UX. There are lots of good thread information here though, as well as a few very good books on HP-UX system administration. I think a book that had more than a chapter on Oracle performance may be overkill....

In your Oracle documentation, they will always give you tunable parameters that they recommend you change. Some of these are of course common sense, others are a bit more obscure.

Other things, I think are common sysadmin things that help performance. I.E. How much RAM, creating swap over many disks with the same priority to ensure syncronous activity, removing all unnecessary services, HFS file system for /tmp for faster access, good cleanup procedures, etc...

Quite frankly, I keep a lot of my own notes for different types of servers including file system minimums, kernel minimums and formulas, etc... Mainly because FEA compute servers have many different needs than an Oracle DB server....

Regards,
Shannon

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Tim,

There used to be a cource taught jointly by HP and Oracle 'Managing Oracle on HP-UX'. When I took it, it was 'Managing Oracle7 on HP-UX 10.x'. It dealt with exactly the parameters you are interested in. Unfortunely I don't see it listed anymore. You might contact HP or ORACLE Education and see if the class is still available. The best feature of the course was that we students trusted nothing the guys were saying and measured everything. The first thing we found was forget HFS use OnLineJFS with convosync=direct,mincache=direct for datafiles and indices.

Regards, Clay

[eran maor]

Hi Tim

here is a good link for hp-ux oracle :
http://www.hporaclectc.com/html/database.html

it this link you will find info about kernel param and patches and more info .

and also you can find cookbook for install !!!.

[Rita C Workman]

I must agree with what has already been said. I would also like to add, that from my experience taking some courses on Oracle, specifically database administration has been what has helped me the most. I found a "crash" course that was given by STR Education Services in Virginia (USA) that helped me..possibly you can find something similar to you. At least gaining a more in depth understanding of what the database is doing and how it works helped me. Especially working with tuning what it needed from the OS. And those workbooks that came with the class; I still use.
So you might look into some education services and see what they offer....
Just a thought,
/rcw

[Tim Malnati]

Eran, I don't know about that link... All I get is: HTTP Error 403...403.6 Forbidden: IP address rejected

Seems that Clay and Shannon have a difference of opinion regarding file system types. I tend to prefer vxfs for a bunch of reasons, but the comment that access is faster on hfs is one I would like more of an explanation before I buy it.

So it looks like I need to become a DBA in yet another environment. From what I've experienced so far with this one using Oracle based apps is that it is totally different than what I've seen with an Oracle data warehouse. Also, please excuse my bonehead subject line - I'm naturally confused.

[Shannon Petry]

I'll try to answer your question about why HFS is faster...

First, I dont want to be misleading. JFS can be faster, but only when there are lots of spindle to spread the load. Normal OS opperations may mirror the OS volumes, but it will not take advantage of striping. Just common sense OS layout without wasting tons of disk will dictate this.

Because HFS is direct read/write as opposed to logging, compression, etc... On a single disk running mirrored HFS will give better performance. IT may not ve huge, but it's enough to make a difference if anything is writing alot to /tmp. Most of the time, listener startup logs are there, lots of script activity, etc...

JFS has benefits when striping volumes over many disks. Plain and simple. The benefits of somethin like /tmp being HFS are miniscule but we all know that on a busy server, every little bit helps!

Regards,
Shannon