[SGVLUG] Are there any oracle gurus on this list?

[Mark Echeverri]

I'll weigh in on this one.  I used Oracle on Solaris for quite a while;
faked it as a DBA for part of that time; tried putting Oracle on Linux
once but gave up because it wasn't critical and I deemed it too much
trouble.

Oracle is solid and slow.  It's got a lot of feature-bloat, which can be
either convenient or annoying.  Installing it on Solaris wasn't too
hard; I read the instructions and used the Java GUI installer and it
came out all right.  When I tried installing the Oracle client libraries
on my Red Hat 8 desktop a couple of years ago, it got messy:  Oracle,
like many proprietary software vendors, doesn't like the
unpredictability of Linux.  They've got (or at least, had) some rather
strict requirements about how the system needed to be set up, and I was
unwilling to make those changes.  [I had observed this with Solaris,
too, actually:  You don't install Oracle so much as let it colonize your
system.  I guess that's just as well, because however many resources
you've got, they'll all be consumed by this monster database!]

I think you can put Oracle onto any sort of filesystem you like.
Reiserfs and/or LVM shouldn't be a problem.  Yes, Oracle may prefer raw
partitions (see what I mean about taking over), but it can live on less.

On backups:  There are hot backups and cold backups.  For a cold backup,
you use regular archiving techniques (e.g., tar) to back up the database
files and associated transaction log files.  For a hot backup, Oracle
has a tool for dumping a self-consistent data snapshot to the
filesystem.

On being an Oracle DBA:  This is a heavyweight job; I should know, since
I never made it past the "faking it" stage as a DBA.  (I never wanted
to, either!)  However, sometime after I handed off administration to
somebody else, I discovered a tool called Toad (proprietary software,
unfortunately, but so is Oracle, and if you have to work with one...).
Toad is relatively expensive--a couple of thousand a license, I think--,
but if your employer will spring for it, it is worth the investment.  If
you use Toad, you'll be able to fake it as an Oracle DBA a whole lot
better than if you used straight scripts or Oracle's own Java-based
administrative GUI's; and odds are the money won't go to waste since the
long-term DBA will also want to use it.  Toad is a really slick tool,
but it's not all just superficial eye-candy.  For example, rather than
simply generating SQL/DDL/DML text and executing it out of sight, as
many GUI's are prone to do, Toad allows you to review/modify/save/etc.
all such commands before they are sent to the server, and to save the
script as part of an annotated audit trail.  It's nothing you couldn't
do yourself with scripts and a source-control system, provided you had
time to slog through 3000 pages of PDF files....  The beauty of GUI
tools is interface discoverability, and with Oracle there's a whole lot
you need to discover!