Following the comment posted by
Harry I wanted to broaden this out a little.
I started in my first DBA role 3 years ago. The production finance system was Oracle Financials 10.7 CUI running on Oracle 7.3.4 on a DG/UX Aviion server.The company is still running that configuration today.
Now, I'm working in an IT team of 5 people.We have 2 production systems with third party applications on 8.1.7.0 SE on Windows 2000.To class either of these systems as 'busy' I'd need to reach 10 concurrent users. Seriously.
The databases were installed about 18 months before I joined the company. They were put in by the third party applications vendor, just a standard install accepting all the defaults.
As the systems are not 24x7, nor are they heavily used at the moment, there isn't much of a requirement for me to intervene.There were a few little tasks for me to do initially, such as changing default passwords and multiplexing controlfiles and redo logs, but at the moment, I just have to keep an eye on them and let them tick over.Our production finance system is about 25GB in size, the project system is at 5GB.
As you can probably imagine, being a DBA is not my only job function here. I'm currently rewriting our Security Policy and leading various projects including looking at change control, housekeeping and disaster recovery.
I try and keep in with Oracle stuff as much as I can, through papers, books, websites etc, but it can be difficult to find the time with so many other responsibilities.
I know of DBA's who have allocated reading and research time during the working day, I'm still trying to convince people that sitting at my desk reading, or browsing the internet is not
'wasting my time'.
There are so many things I want to do with the databases, but the general consensus here is that they are working fine and
'don't need played with'.
Things I need to do include patching from 8.1.7.0.0 to at least 8.1.7.4 and trying to build in some resilience.
My next big task is the business has announced it wants to upgrade to the next version of one of the applications. The new app is not, however, supported on 8i.
So I'll just have to upgrade the database to 9i.
I'd never done an install or upgrade before - I just did the test system a couple of months ago - but as one of my colleagues pointed out
'you get a CD, it can't be that hard'.
So to answer Harry, I won't forget about the little guys using SE, because I am one of them.
Are there any more of us out there?