Forum OpenACS Q&A: Oracle - experiences with 9i and 10g?

1: Oracle - experiences with 9i and 10g?

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 08/23/04 05:28 PM

I am moving one of our Oracle sites to a new server and it seems like a good opportunity to upgrade from 8.1.7.4 to something a bit more modern. So I'm gathering info on whether I should play it safe and stick with 9i, or go all the way to 10g (or do nothing at all).

So far, what I've found is that people generally find 9i to be stable, though I have seen some reports that it consumes a lot more system resources than 8i did (but not specifically on Linux). 10g, OTOH, seems a little shaky; Oracle has had to withdraw the latest patchset because it was causing problems with CLOBs, and folks generally seem to regard it as being somewhat experimental.

Although going straight to 10g would let me skip an upgrade, I'm more concerned with stability so the extra future upgrade does not bother me.

Any experiences, war stories, rumors, etc out there?

2: Re: Oracle - experiences with 9i and 10g? (response to 1)

Posted by Senthil Kumar on 08/23/04 07:04 PM

Make sure you capture your top 20 sql during the peak production hour in 8i. Analyze and test it in 9i server first.

Oralce 9i optimizer is very sensitive and you need to have proper statistics collected on all tables and index to get an optimized performance.

If in case your performance degrades after upgrading to 9i, use the OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE parameter to make oracle optimizer behave like the old version.

Good luck.

Senthil kumar

3: Re: Oracle - experiences with 9i and 10g? (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 08/24/04 03:55 PM

I'm also interested in how well 10g is working, so please do report back with whatever you find, Janine.

One of my coworkers is playing a bit with 10g on Linux in his spare time (I think so far just installing it), but it isn't a priority for us, so you'll likely have converted your site and be done long before we really dig into it seriously.

Apparently Oracle's also claiming that it works fine to upgrade a database directly from 8i to 10g, skipping 9i entirely. If true, that should be nice.

Hm, does anyone even know if OpenACS (what version?) is compatible with 10g? And in what version did OpenACS became fully out of the box compatible with Oracle 9i?

4: Re: Oracle - experiences with 9i and 10g? (response to 1)

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 08/24/04 04:17 PM

Andrew, it looks almost certain we'll be going with 9i. When I started asking around I heard a lot of doubts about 10g and very few about 9i. Coincidentally, on Monday Oracle had to pull the 10.0.3 patchset on some platforms because it was causing CLOB corruption; I'm sure it will be fixed soon but still, I think going to 10g right now is more adventurous than I want to be.

Also, FWIW some people feel that the 9.2.0.5 patch is buggy and are recommending sticking with 9.2.0.4. Others say it's fine, so YMMV.