Forum OpenACS Q&A: Oracle SE Experience

Posted by defunct defunct on 08/14/01 07:35 PM

Hi folks,

Apologies in advance as this question is Oracle (rather than PS)
related, but given the anticipated inter-operability of OpenACS 4,
it may well be pertinent.
Has anyone had any direct experience of using (the much more
reasonably priced) Oracle Standard Edition with ACS?
We have been doing some initial testing with it following assurances
from Oracle that SE and EE are common binary sources. To my relief
it appears to be functioning adequately. At this stage the only
visible problem is bitmap indexes which are disabled in SE. I can
see the logic behind bm indexes for v.large data stores, but given
that folks who are looking for a cheaper alternative (i.e SE) are
less likely to have such large data requirements, is this all that
significant?
Its worth noting however that the bm indexes are placed on the
'core' acs tables, and in particular those tables which are at the
heart of those areas of the data model, most responsible for ACS4's
sometimes questionable scalability.
In any case, if anyone has anything useful to pitch in I would be
most grateful. Particularly before we spend any significant time in
further assessment.

Warmest regards
Simon

2: Response to Oracle SE Experience (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 08/14/01 09:00 PM

Oracle questions are fine here since, as you've noted, we're supporting both PG and Oracle with OACS 4.

AFAIK no one has measured the performance implications of replacing the bitmap indexes with straight indexes. It would be good to have some solid numbers. AFAIK aD never measured the impact themselves, at
least I've never seen any numbers published by them.

The impact would
have to be very dramatic to justify the extra cost, IMO. It's cheaper to buy a separate server to use as an AOLserver front-end to offload the box with the db on it than it is to upgrade to EE, for instance. It's
a *lot* cheaper. Oracle SE would have more RAM to play in and more cycles available for its use. Or you could buy more RAM or a faster CPU and pay the increased SE license.

It just seems that there are many better ways to spend the extra $$$ than to do so just for bitmapped indexes. Now that SE comes with the INSO filters for InterMedia the argument for EE is pretty toothless for the ACS.

3: Response to Oracle SE Experience (response to 1)

Posted by defunct defunct on 08/15/01 09:07 AM

Don, thanks for that. I'll post up some more info as we progress
with our SE testing.
As an aside a couple of people have mailed me directly regarding the
availability of SE 8.1.7 on the technet site.
To confirm, we are using 8.1.7 but were not able to get it off
technet. According to our account manager at Oracle, it has been
removed ?? We therefore had to acquire a disk set. For those of you
in the UK apparently Sphinx are the only people who can supply disk
sets. And basically you have to ring them, be nice to them, then
shout at them, and then remind them half a dozen times 😉

Warmest regards
Simon

4: Response to Oracle SE Experience (response to 1)

Posted by Daryl Biberdorf on 10/17/01 03:49 PM

While not necessarily applicable outside the U.S., I found out today that the Oracle CD sets (available at Oracle's online store) include 8.1.7 Standard Edition as well as Enterprise Edition. Just choose "CD Packs" from the Quick Search drop down and enter 8.1.7 in the box. Click Go, and the site will show you everything.

5: Response to Oracle SE Experience (response to 1)

Posted by Allan Regenbaum on 11/09/01 03:31 PM

We deployed a ACS4 classic using SE on Solaris. We are serving well over a million hits per day with no scalability problem... The only changes were to remove bitmap and functional indices. We also had to remove references to Intermedia and repair some problems relating to permission_p.

6: Response to Oracle SE Experience (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 11/09/01 05:34 PM

That's good to hear, it makes me feel good about our decision to dump non-SE index types in OpenACS 4.

Folks here have also whacked on permissions a bit to make them more efficient. Do you want to share what you did to improve performance? It's very likely you did something similar but who knows, maybe you've thought of something different that will help OpenACS 4's performance, and maybe we've thought of something different that will help your site's performance ...

InterMedia is part of SE, you just can't use the autosynch-on-insert feature. OpenACS 4 by default works fine with SE's InterMedia capabilities, EE users can uncomment out the pertinent SQL if they want (later I would like to make this an installation option)