Installing DBPrism 3.0.2.1.0 (in-Oracle-Lucene) on a WinXP-10gR2

Introduction

This post talks, shares experiences, about installing Marcelo Ochoa’s (MO, Marcelo Ochoa’s personal blog) in-oracle-lucene implementation into an oracle 10.2.0.3 on winxp. MO did a really great job in porting a raw lucene to an oracle database. His essential trick is actually to represent the file system layer, lucene usually lives in, within a blob based storage as well as employing the oracle odci-interface. Any further information is available in the online documentation here Lucene Domain Index.

Downloads

The latest version of the code stack is available as lucene-odi-bin-3.0.2.1.0.zip from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbprism/files/odi/3.0.2.1.0/. Do not care about the sourceforge project being called DBPrism or this other code stack around being tagged ojvm, this is all history. The latest version to comprise the lucene 3.0.2 core base is lucene-odi, lucene-ojvm currently features the lucene 2.9.2 core base as just a maintainance release.

Another necessary download is ant, as a build and installation runtime environment. I sourced apache-ant-1.8.1-bin.zip from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi. Finally, iff you plan to compile the java code to windows dll’s for better performance (especially on production hosts), you may need to get Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express from http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads. Its free and will supply, beneath a lot of other stuff, what is expected, i.e. provides for a C++ compiler and dll linker.

Your eye into the buffer cache

ever asked yourself what is going on in the buffer cache? e.g., does oracle honour my settings for the different buffer cache types, that is, the default, keep and recycle cache? or, does oracle tune the buffer cache nicely, such that the application important database objects are in fact cached?

the latter is, however, not only oracle’s duty. imagine an application where there is an index missing on a large table. on every unindexed select, oracle will have to full scan the table, flooding the buffer cache with unwanted blocks. but how to trap this scenario?

the solution key is v$bh or, internally, x$bh, a system view that allows a blockwise inspection of the buffer cache. some pretend that v$bh has been introduced with oracle parallel server (ops), others relate it to the real application cluster (rac) environment.

A restore and recovery duration test

the following information is something one hardly finds on the net or in printed material. that is, this information is not really tricky to examine or even secret. it is just difficult to describe and to express because it depends on such a multitude of other information, mainly system power and configuration, that no rule of thumb can be established.

the information is: how long does it take to fully restore and recover my database (did you ever try?).

i’m not going to discuss performance optimizations here. i’ll only show up with a test lab report that someone else may or may not reuse for a personal examination or comparison.

this is what i had:

• dell pe6850, 4 xeon 7130 (dual core, 3.2 ghz), 8 gb ram, win 2003 enterprise r2 sp2
• oracle 10.2.0.3 enterprise
• 400 gb online database size
• 110 gb compressed backup set size (85 gb level 0 backup, 20 gb level 1 backup, 5 gb archivelog backup)
• 3 active rman channels to disk
• nearly no secondary load on the system

this is what i achived:

• 5 hours

have fun.