Oracloid Blog

You probably wouldn’t expect a technical Oracle post here. But I can’t call it Oracle blog without relevant content so here it goes. Let’s call it a late birthday present — my first post came on the 2nd of May, 2006 so it’s now one year, one month and one week old.

Today, purely by accident, I came across Metalink Note 413098.1 Extremely Poor RMAN Backup Performance to NFS After Upgrade to 10.2 on Solaris. It seems that it also affects HP-UX at least.

What I love the best from that note is the workaround for RAC environments:

Do not write backups to NFS at 10.2. Backup to tape using Oracle Secure Backup or an alternative Media Manager or backup to a local disk drive.

Oracle Secure Backup?!?! Does it mean mean it has fewer bugs? Nice ad.

I.e. if my backup infrastructure is based on NFS - I’m screwed. The advice basically turns into “do not backup your databases - it’s slow”. Where are the other workarounds like stay on 10.1 or 9i? “Don’t use big databases” would be just as appropriate.

If I have time, I’m going to test it on Linux but if someone has interest - benchmark backups from 10.1. and 10.2 on NFS and let us know. Better yet, run it through strace and check the system calls.

I was looking on the grid computing syndrome and to my surprise Google Trends “Grid Computing” shows that hype around it was actually going down since 2004:

Interesting that the Oracle Grid Index shows continuous growth:

I can only think of some possible reasons for this deviation:

• People are moving from talking about it to really doing it.
• Oracle (well, Quocirca) publishes some biased or non-relevant results.
• “Senior IT influencers and decision makers” are overstating the figures.
• Google Trend graph is not relevant.