November DBA Rant

OK, Who else out there has a 3.8TB tablespace? Anyone, anyone? Bueller, Bueller??

I know, I know- Oracle can support terabytes and terabytes of data in one tablespace, so what is my complaint? Most developers, both database and application do not have the technology to access that data efficiently enough and DBA’s rarely have the disk read and write hardware that will support the kind of pressure that will result from large tablespaces.

I am moving more and more of my hardest hit data to ram disk, but it’s expensive and all of us know the challenges at budget time when you have the choice of cheap, slow disk vs. expensive, fast disk. Pointy haired bosses are not going to see the difference until they start utilizing the database themselves and then, as we all know, the database is guilty until proven innocent.

To compensate for this, I am a firm believer in smaller, narrow tables in star schemas in smaller, easier to manage tablespace “chunks”. I vow to the DBA Gods that I will prune off partitions, first chance I can get ANYONE to sign off on a retention period and teach my developers the power of materialized views, step-through tables, staging tables and to tread lightly in the database.

Now, to go mark my calendar, most likely for one of the holidays coming up to move 3.8TB to more manageable tablespaces and make the developers fix their code that put it there in the first place! 🙂