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Question and Answer

Tom Kyte

Thanks for the question, Tim.

Asked: May 18, 2001 - 3:49 pm UTC

Last updated: December 09, 2005 - 1:27 am UTC

Version: 8.1.5

Viewed 1000+ times

You Asked

Tom:

I want to know what do you mean by "Oracle 8.1.6 for solaris 64 bit"? I have seen so many places mentined 16 bit Oracle or 32 bit Oracle or 64 bit Oracle. Now I found Oracle 8.1.6 for solaris 64 bit and I hoping definately it should be for 32 bit and 16 bit solaris also. Same thing for NT 64 bit or 32 bit or 16 bit.

Basically what I want to know weather Oracle itself in differ from 64 bit to 32 bit or 32 bit to 16 bit.
or
It's operating system specific, I mean Oracle for 64 bit solaris or Oracle for 32 bit/16 bit solaris (also for NT OS).

Thanks

Tim


and Tom said...

There is no such thing as 16 bit solaris.

Oracle (the database) operates much the same regardless of the "bits" on the system. We are very portable that way.

A 64bit OS would allow us to address much more memory then a 32bit one. On a 32bit system (a system where pointers are 32bits) we can address 4gig or less of RAM. That limits the size of an SGA. On a 64bit system -- we can address an incredibly large SGA.

16, 32, 64 all speak to the native word size of the underlying hardware. We have versions of Oracle for 32 bit platforms and 64 bit platforms. Windows used to be a 16 bit application (DOS) and the tools that ran on it were 16 bit. We windows 3.x came out -- things could be "win32" or 16 bit -- hence the large number of "16 bit" or "32 bit" tools you saw.



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Comments

16 bit or 32 bit or 64 bit

Sanjeev, May 21, 2001 - 4:21 am UTC

Good One!!!

How would i know if the Oracle db is 32 or 64 bit ?

Alvin, February 15, 2004 - 12:34 am UTC

How would i know if the Oracle db is 32 or 64 bit ? i ran sqlplus in our solaris server and it says.


SQL*Plus: Release 8.1.7.0.0 - Production on Sat Feb 14 21:28:44 2004

(c) Copyright 2000 Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.

My Unix SA says it could be the sqlplus is 32 bit but oracle db itself can be 64 bit. Where do i check ?

Tom Kyte
February 15, 2004 - 11:30 am UTC

if the OS is 64 bit only (eg: 9i's on AIX, HP) the db is definitely 64bit.

if the OS is either 32 or 64 bit (eg: solaris for example), the banner would say "64bit"

Actually -- the person that needs to know, the only one it affects, the DBA would already know this. They installed it after all.

To the end user, to the developer, it is not "visible", it isn't something they need to see really. They cannot tell the difference between 64 and 32 bitness in the database. It changes none of their code, it changes nothing they can "see"

question clarification

Alvin, February 15, 2004 - 3:15 am UTC

As posted above.

1. How/Where do i find out whether or not our Oracle DB is in 32 or 64 bit on a Oracle 8.1.7.0.0 db ?

I was applying the 8174 (32bit) patch on our developmental database to determine how much time a database patch consumes. On the OEM installer GUI i hit an error the partial snapshot of the logs are...

Calling action unixActions1.7.1.8.0 make
installMakePath = /usr/ccs/bin/make
installMakeFileName = /export/spare/app/oracle/product/8.1.7/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk
installTarget = ioracle
undoMakeFileName =
installArguments = ORACLE_HOME=/export/spare/app/oracle/product/8.1.7,
logFile = /export/spare/app/oracle/product/8.1.7/install/make.log
undoTarget =

Exception thrown from action: make
Exception Name: MakefileException
Exception String: Error in invoking target ioracle of makefile /export/spare/app/oracle/product/8.1.7/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk
Exception Severity: 1
*** Cancel Dialog: ***
User selected: Stop installation of all products.

Error in invoking target ioracle of makefile /export/spare/app/oracle/product/8.1.7/rdbms/lib/ins_rdbms.mk/export/spare/app/oracle/oraInventory/logs->

2. Say that my UNIX SA is right that the oracle software installed was a 64bit one. He's suggesting that i install the 32 bit over the existing installation. I'm a little doubtful with his suggestion an am seeking for your advice. Can i just install the 32bit over the 64 bit one or will there be (any) complications ahead ?


Tom Kyte
February 15, 2004 - 11:49 am UTC

Please contact support for installation/configuration questions like this -- that is what they are really good at. without the right information, one cannot make the right suggestions. I don't even know what OS you are on (and no, just providing that won't let me answer either).


Please -- use support for something like this.

How to expand the SGA limit for 32 bit

Vikas Khanna, December 08, 2005 - 3:54 pm UTC

Hi Tom,

We have installed Oracle 10g on Linux box having 16 GB of physical RAM available.We were configuring the SGA memory structures and found that the SGA SIZE could n't go beyond 1.7 GB

However, when we used the init.ora parameter USE_INDIRECT_DIRECT_BUFFERS = true we were able to grow the SGA by using the db_block_buffers increased instead of using the db_cache_size.

This created a shared memory file system under /dev/shm and the filename is
-rw-r----- 1 oracle dba 1476395008 Dec 8 01:33 ora_adamdw_983043

with adamdw being the instance name. My current SGA looks like
Total System Global Area 2785017856 bytes
Fixed Size 779056 bytes
Variable Size 1299193040 bytes
Database Buffers 1474560000 bytes
Redo Buffers 10485760 bytes

My boss has even suggested to go in for Lower mapped base address which will release 1GB to get allocated to Variable SGA. That's what he suggested:

cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
genksms -s 0x15000000 > ksms.s
make -f ins_rdbms.mk ksms.o
make -f ins_rdbms.mk ioracle

Can you please describe the whole idea behind this. Is this trick really beneficial.

Thanks



Tom Kyte
December 09, 2005 - 1:27 am UTC

answer this very simple question: do you need such a large SGA, are you gaining benefit from having a larger SGA.


that'll tell you if you want "larger memory" - and there are many metalink notes describing the process.