Hi everyone
Well… apologies for the delays in blogging recently… I’ve been busy pottering away on a solution for a client. This involves running 64 bit Oracle Database 10Gr2 (10.2.0.4) on a x64 Windows 2k3 system…also utilising Oracle’s Fail Safe software, which allows you to run your DR database/application server for 10 individual calendar days (or part of) per year without any additional license costs.
This series will cover off some interesting facts and points (hopefully) and help my fellow DBAs in looking at this as a possible solution.
First things first… Why Windows?
Well in this instance, the client is 100% Windows based. It makes no sense to use any other technology for them. They’d have to retrain staff (extra cost), buy specific hardware, software and vendor support (extra cost) and then there’s the whole hassle of keeping it supported (extra cost).
Next: Why 64 bit?
Well… 64 bit Oracle can perform much better than it’s 32 bit cousin (memory addressing/buffer wise), the 64 bit Windows can address more memory also, which allows for greater scalability options for the business. This is important. I’m in the business of helping business, not satisfing my technology ego.
To be honest, now 64 bit architecture has been around for some time, you’d be crazy not to be building systems using 64 bit Windows OS and database/application server software.
Finally… Large Pages
So to end this little monologue, the final bonus of using Windows 64 bit with Oracle 64 bit is the Large Pages, which means rather than using 4k page files to store elements in memory, by activating the Large Pages option in Windows 64 bit gives you 2mb page files to store elements in. Making database buffer reading much faster and wider (if that makes sense). There are a multitude of blogs and technical articles on enabling the feature… so when I get a second, I’ll dig the links out and place them here.
In the next part (Part 2 believe it or not!), I’ll go over the initial steps that will need to happen to build our foundation active/passive cluster with Oracle Fail Safe installed also.
If you want more detail anywhere, ask me (comment below).
Cheers
