Last month I posted a message regarding Oracle and multiple system aborts.
We had recently updated to PP5 and also installed Oracle 7.3, with the new
listener process. In all, we experienced 7 system aborts and 3 listener
'hangs', with a bad pin requiring a reboot of the system to clear. This
problem was referred to the HP escalation center where HP's and Oracle's
labs in India worked to determine the cause of the problem. I was very
impressed by the dedication of resources to this problem by HP's
Escalation Center.
The point of failure was isolated to a piece of HP's networking code
working on behalf of a call from an Oracle process. The call was basically
initiated to kill a socket, and that socket did not exist so the system
failed. HP and Oracle are looking at why this scenario exists, but in the
mean time we turned off an Oracle parameter, 'sqlnet_expire_time', to
prevent the code from ever taking the fatal path. This parameter, aka dead
connection detection, has been off for 3 weeks now and there have been no
more problems. The loss of that parameter has not proven detrimental in
any other regard...
On another note, the issue about the future of Oracle on the HP3000 was
recently discussed on this list. In the corporate world, this issue has
already been decided. Most new applications that we see come in require
Oracle8, or at least 7.3.3. The HP3000 is seen as lagging far behind NT
and Unix as HP and Oracle's preferred platforms. Thus, the NT side of the
house has gained a firm foothold in our Oracle area. All new apps will
certainly (and justifiably) go there. I proposed a single high-end HP9000
to handle the upcoming load of Oracle based applications, including data
warehousing, but our Oracle reps have said the NT box can handle 100,000
Oracle transactions a day and is dirt cheap and more reliable than a Unix
based solution. We'll soon see...
The sad note in this is that the HP3000 proved to be an extremely reliable
platform for Oracle for 4 years, other than our 7.3 related issues. Now,
even if the powers that be get Oracle8 on the HP3000, it will still be seen
as a secondary platform for Oracle since it is so far behind. Just one
less reason for us to keep our HP3000...
|
