Boredworkers.com

I’ve worked with a number of enterprise type databases in my time but none as slow and cumbersome as Oracle. Even the old clunky version of Informix 5.0 is more resource effective than the bloated giant that is Oracle. I’ve managed to run IBM’s DB2 off a Windows desktop machine with 256MB of RAM and even gone as far as holding development workshops with that setup. But now, after my first run in with Oracle, I must say that I am NOT impressed.

Note:
In case you’re going to suggest using Oracle Lite or Oracle Express, forget it. I have my orders to run the simulation with Oracle Enterprise, so let it go. I’ve also checked the documentation and the computer I’m using as a testbed fulfills the necessary requirements.

First things first, installing Oracle was a pain. Installing the full Oracle 9i Enterprise Edition requires 2.86GB for the software and 1GB+ for the database! What the hey?! What the heck do you need 1GB+ for? This is an empty database mind you. Such a huge overhead for database performance monitoring and tablespace? I’m sure you can work with less.

My office machine has approximately 14GB of harddisk space. 10GB of it is taken, which leaves 4GB. The installers downloaded from Oracle take up approximately 1.3GB of space. That left 2.7GB. Not even enough to stick in the software, let alone the database with its ridiculous minimum space requirement. And I haven’t even exploded the zip archives yet. So the choice is either to burn the installation files onto CD or run it off an external drive. The latter would be much too slow due to transfer rates. Even so, running the installation off a CD was no speed demon either. It still took all of an hour to get the necessary software installed. I opted to just install the software and create my own database. At some point during the installation, my PC ground to such a slow crawl that I was afraid to move my mouse in case something exploded.

My first attempt at installation failed. It completed without complaint but when I checked for the installed components with their ‘Universal Installer’, it returned me an empty list. However, when I checked, the installer had copied over 1.4GB of worthless data! Bloody stinking stools. Don’t tell me the damned Universal Installer itself takes up more than 1GB of real estate?! Fortunately, after cleaning up the mess, my second attempt was met with greater success.

Once the installation was done, I was still left with the task of creating a database instance. I went with the bare minimum which still required close to 1GB of space. If I thought the installation process was slow, the instance creation was worse! On DB2, dropping and recreating and configuring an empty database would normally take about 3 minutes. Oracle decided to take 2 hours! I dozed off during the process only to be woken up by my manager asking me what was going on. I pointed to the screen and told him to buy me a new computer.

The screen capture above shows the resource usage during the database creation process. Oracle was taking up 140MB+ of memory and chewing up between 50% - 97% of the CPU resource. as if that wasn’t bad enough, Oracle fired up an Apache server after its installation was complete. That took up 30MB of memory. And to make matters worse, Oracle runs off a Java platform which took up another 18MB of memory while the runtime environment (JRE) took up 25MB. SQLplus was required on top of whatever resources Oracle was already hogging to perform the necessary database commands which locked up another 14MB. Throw in the Java Windows loader for running the database creation executable which took up 4MB. Total up everything and you wind up with approximately 231MB of memory which is nearly half the resources I have available (512MB).

The good news is that once it was up and running, Oracle performs fairly well, albeit still hogging resources like a pirate. So yeah, while I won’t deny Oracle their props for being a good DBMS, I must question their resource management. Surely they can run on less. Since I have no extensive experience with Oracle, I shall refrain from commenting further.

All you Database Admins out there. What do you think? Is Oracle and its ‘tools’ actually worth all the resources that it hogs?