Gripe!

[Cringer]

Why on earth in this day and age does the OE Dev Studio license not allow you to start a database with large files enabled? I can understand other Enterprise features being restricted but Large Files? For goodness sake. It's going to make migrating to 11.5 a right royal pain in the backside.

 

[TheMadDBA]

I guess we can lump this in with my gripes about not being able to just download any license you want as long as it is for development purposes... for free. I downloaded a full enterprise copy of Oracle 12 for my laptop just a few weeks back... with all of the cool features enabled and no expiration date.

PSC should be able to provide you with temporary license keys to install the full enterprise DB on a test server while you are in the process of upgrading so at least you have a path (although frustrating) to follow.

 

[Cringer]

We've basically been breaking our license agreement for years. All developers have had the enterprise rdbms and appserver licenses installed locally. But we can't do that now as our server is 64bit and we need 32bit development. One way around it is to install 64bit progress alongside 32bit and serve the dbs 64bit, but that's still breaking licensing.

 

[TheMadDBA]

Ouch... Dare I ask why they all have a local copy of the database and are not connecting to a shared dev/test server?

 

[Cringer]

Because we work from home 2 days a week. We carry our own development database around on encrypted hard disks.

 

[TheMadDBA]

So no VPN connections from home? That would certainly help with making sure the client server performance was tuned

Depending on how often you refresh those databases it could be good practice to see how quickly you can get a dump and reload to happen.

 

[Cringer]

We have VPN. It would be unusable with PDSOE. lol

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

We have VPN. It would be unusable with PDSOE.

I think what he meant was leave the computer (I assume it's a laptop) at work and VPN in from home; RDP to the laptop from your home PC. Then PDSOE, and any other DB clients, are local to the server. So you can all share test/dev DBs that stay on servers and not have to cart them around and update them constantly.

 

[Cringer]

Urgh. Programming via RDP is a nightmare IMO.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

Yeah, it's not ideal. My biggest gripe, as we don't use a TS gateway, is that I don't have multiple monitors in my RPD session. Other than that it's not terrible.

Isn't it a pain to keep copying dev databases hither and thither?

 

[Cringer]

I refresh mine once ever 3 months or so. The way our work is structured, we don't really need access to real data when at home, old data suffices. All in all it's not ideal either. The one good thing about having my database is that I can screw it up without impacting anyone else.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

The one good thing about having my database is that I can screw it up without impacting anyone else.

Sharing a server doesn't mean you can't do that. On our dev box we have shared dev DBs. We also have a sandbox partition where devs have their own directories, and permissions to write to them as necessary. Any dev can create their own DBs and temporary code libraries. So if someone wants to do a chunk of work without disrupting anyone else (or being disrupted), then can restore a copy of a dev DB to their own directory, configure brokers and servers, do whatever work they want, and then blow it away when they're done.

 

[Cringer]

Sounds excellent. Unfortunately with a 400GB database and a stone-age attitude to disk allocation we'd struggle. That's despite having something like 40TB of SAN storage available.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

Well, hopefully after your D&L your DB will be a lot less than 400 GB and that will open up new options for you.