Database server upgrade question

We are considering moving our Oracle 9i database from our Win2003 32-bit box onto a Win2003 64-bit box running Oracle 10g. We'd still leave our Enterprise application server on the 32-bit box, so we'd just be isolating our database onto its own 64-bit server.

I'd appreciate any feedback or ideas about whether this sounds like a good move, and if you think this will be a supported configuration from Oracle. I know I'll probably get lots of questions like "why not go Linux", but the reality for us is that we've standardized our servers on Windows, so we don't really have any Linux expertise. And the 64-bit architecture removes the 4GB memory limitation our Oracle database is currently enduring.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Don,

For my $.02 worth, that sounds like a solid plan. Stick with the OS that you are standardized on. Moving Oracle to a dedicated 64-bit processor and leaving your enterprise server on your old box sounds like it will be a screamin' system when it's done. Taking up the conversation from Stoogie on a different thread, add that server as an additional database server. Cut over your PY databases over to that box with OCM and give it a good test run. Once it's rock solid, copy over your Prod and System databases and change up your OCMs. I would leave Oracle and the old tables on your enterprise server for a few weeks as a safety net before dumping them. You can safely disable Oracle on your enterprise server, just don't uninstall it for a while to give yourself a fallback position.

Gregg Larkin
Praxair North American System Admin
JDE CNC and Security, Websphere, Tidal, Princeton Softech

DSauve,

We have done something similar. To start we had an Oracle 8 database on our IBM RS6000 Enterprise Server in our Xe system. We split the database and moved the business data and control data to a Sun box running Oracle 9. We created separate database instances for each environment. The system and pathcode data remained on the RS6000 in Oracle 8. We have been running in production like this for about 6 months without any problem and improved performance.

With our upgrade to 8.11 (go live 17th October 2006) we have completely separated the data from the Enterprise Server (now a Sun box), running Oracle 9 on a separate Sun box.

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We are considering moving our Oracle 9i database from our Win2003 32-bit box onto a Win2003 64-bit box running Oracle 10g. We'd still leave our Enterprise application server on the 32-bit box, so we'd just be isolating our database onto its own 64-bit server.


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Sounds like a great idea. Once Oracle is supporting Microsoft SQL 2005 - we'll be doing the exact same thing with SQL 2005 x64 - as long as you keep the database seperate from the applications this will work well.

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I'd appreciate any feedback or ideas about whether this sounds like a good move, and if you think this will be a supported configuration from Oracle.


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I don't see why x64 wouldn't be supported by Oracle - you might have some resistance if you got into serious database issues with JDE response line (1st level support) - but since you're using their database engine, they should provide excellent support on the back end. I'd say that this is a good architecture - whether you're using Linux OR windows

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I know I'll probably get lots of questions like "why not go Linux", but the reality for us is that we've standardized our servers on Windows, so we don't really have any Linux expertise.


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And that is the reason any company should use to make their platform choice. You're doing the right thing by sticking with the platform you're used to and you know well. Linux makes sense only if you have the expertise - it has nothing to do with license costs.

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And the 64-bit architecture removes the 4GB memory limitation our Oracle database is currently enduring.


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The big difference for you is the grid architecture. I'm looking forward to hearing how well the grid works for you ! You should be able to set up an architecture that has full load-balancing and failover with 10G.

Good luck !