Wednesday, January 3. 2007
Oracle® Database 2 Day DBA
Contents
I always thought of databases as rocket science, but a few weeks ago, I had
to prepare a database tuning demo for a Power5 performance tuning course we held and I was astonished how easy it was to install and set up IBM's DB2.
And within a week, I created an unattended DB2 install, a Java-based DB2 client pushing BLOBs into the database to create some load to finding sensible values for DB2 tuning parameters.
If you told me that some months ago, I would have run away, wildly laughing.
Ok, the downside of this story: My Java-Client didn't generate enough load for the database so I went on and used Pole Position to keep it busy.
But today, I found something interesting:Â I just downloaded and installed Oracle 10 to have a closer look at it and I found something I wouldn't have expected some two or three years ago: Oracle(as well as DB2) has some kind of self-tuning mechanism.
Back in the Dotcom bubble, database tuning was considered some arcane art and I bet, sometimes it still is, but I was positively surprised that in most cases, one can just install the preferred database product and it will perform quite good out of the box while keeping administration simple.
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