hi, tom:
i am faced with the choice of using 32bit or 64bit oracle on my 64 bit s80 machine.
We did not need large memory support(the RAM is 4G),is it necessary for me to choose 64bit Oracle?
From metalink feedback, 64bit oracle is more buggy than 32bit:
So far I have not recieved an excellent feedback after moving from 32bit to 64bit.
There could be some performance degradation after migrating to 64-bit from 32-bit OS. (From Metalink) ??
Can u give me some instructions?
Thanks so much!

We currently run 32 bit Oracle 8.1.6 on HP-UX 11.0 N CLASS
SERVER WITH 2GB RAM. I have just received the CDs for Oracle 8.1.7 and I was planning to install the 64 bit version of 8.1.7. I read your feedback of slow performance of 64 bit Oracle.
Do you recommend using 64 bit on HP-UX 11.0 , our environment is memory intensive ?

hi tom
i want to ask you this question
that can we run 32 bit oracle on 64 bit os say( aix or windows)
what will be the repecussions
and at the os level what is taking place.

also how 64 bit os is communicating with 64 bit application.

what are the packages involved in managing both versions of oracle(32/64) bit.

thanks

hi tom
if we have to use 32 bit tnsping exes (along with dependent
dlls on 32 bit windows) on 64 bit windows, do you in general see an issue?
or is the 32 bit code gonna in general work with 64 bit
OS?

thanx!

Tom,

We plan to buy a new Sun box (Solaris 8/9 64bit) with 16GB RAM and we're gonna put 5 database instances (Ora 9i Rel 2) on it. While SGA occupied by each instance will not exceed 4 gig, the total SGA for all 5 instances can be more than 4 gig.

Do I have to go with 64bit or just install the 32bit? Based on your experience, will 64bit oracle 9i run slower than 32bit on Solaris?

Thank you so much.

Tom,
I need to migrate my database from 32bit to 64 bit. Can I do it just by switching to 64bit Home and start the database using 64bit S/w

Thanks in advance

Hello,

We were doing some benchmark experiments and found some interesting case with 32 BIT & 64 BIT Oracle Versions.

We create 2 oracle instances (one 32 bit & one 64 bit)on test box. We developed one script to generate test data. Script was written to generate fixed size data. Which means after generating X MB data, execution was terminated.

On 64 Bit Oracle we found that no. of rows generated were higher (approx. 25%) as that of 32 Bit Oracle with same size of data. Which means say for X MB Size, 32 bit ORACLE generated Y rows whereas 64 bit ORACLE generated 1.2Y rows.

Can you throw some light on this?

Yes we used same block size for both instance.

Table field types were Varchar2 & Number.

I am really curious to know if the way 64bit oracle stores data is different as that of 32-bit oracle.

Thank you for help.

I wanted to know if Oracle 9i release 2 (32 bit) supported on 64 bit Sun 5.8 (solaris 8).

Found following information on Metalink.

<Quote>

• All Server and O/S versions without 64-bit notations indicate 32-bit versions.
• The 64-bit O/S is capable of running programs that were compiled on a 32-bit O/S and 64-bit O/S.
• The 32-bit O/S runs only programs that were compiled on a 32-bit O/S. This is called Binary Compatible.
• A 32-bit application will work on both a 32-bit and 64-bit O/S, whereas a 64-bit application will only work on a 64-bit O/S.
• Note, however, that re-linking must occur on the O/S version that the application was compiled, as this affects patch sets.

</Quote>

Question
--------
What is the meaning of "Note, however, that re-linking must occur on the O/S version that the application was compiled, as this affects patch sets."?

Does it simply mean executing $ORACLE_HOME/bin/relink? What does relink do and how is it related to 32/64 bit problem?
How and when should relink happen?
(in this context?)

Thanks Tom.

Tom,
Sorry to ask again, but just wanted to clear few doubts. When I run Oracle on a 64 bit platform, shouldn't I get a better throughput because internally Oracle is processing more data as compared to 32 bit.

If I want to migrate to 10g, what platform would you recommend, 64 bit or 32 bit, assuming that the SGA will never exceed 2GB.

Thanks

Thanks for your quick reply. If we decide on Intel/Linux platform, what would you say about 32 bit or 64 bit?

Thanks

Very well worded. Straight and to the point.

I found that the 64-bit Intel Xeon MP can still operate some of our 32-bit software, which may not yet be compatible with a 64-bit operating system.

I have been searching for recent information about 64 bit Intel Chips and compatibility with Oracle 9i. Is it still true that Oracle 9i is NOT compatible with 64-bit Intel Xeon /Xeon MP) processors? I know they are compatible with Itanium 2's, but the powers that be are somewhat hesitant to jump to 100% 64-bit software and require an Intel/Microsoft solution. If we could use Xeons to do both 32-bit and 64-bit... then things may be a little easier to manage.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Tom,

How to find whether installed binaries are 32 bit or 64 bit?

32bit
select address from v$sql where rownum=1

ADDRESS
--------
2AED0A44

64bit
select address from v$sql where rownum=1
ADDRESS
----------------
0000000392CC3988

Is there any truth to the notion that math with oracles standard number format is faster on 64bit vs 32bit machines?

Old time dba's I ran into years ago swore that on 64bit machines, oracle math executed in one hardware operation whereas oracle uses software emulation on 32bit platforms.

just want to ask if what is the difference between the 32 bit and 64 bit application software?

Excellent info about 32 and 64 bit softwares

I want to know about a great article on the basis of the 16 Vs 32 bit Operating systems,processors & mainboards!!!

Tom,

I'm hoping you can set my mind at ease on this one.

We are currently running Oracle 9.2.0.6 (64bit) on AIX 5.3 (64bit)

Much to my shock, I found that for the several months we've had the systems (pre-production) online, they have been running the 32 bit kernel.

After some consultation with IBM, I was able to boot into the 64 bit kernel.

Thankfully, Oracle behaves exactly as it did before.

My suspicions were never aroused due to the fact that Oracle has always reported itself as 64 bit:

Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.6.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning and OLAP options
JServer Release 9.2.0.6.0 - Production

My question is, if Oracle has always been reporting itself in 64 bit mode, though the OS was running a 32 bit kernel, is there any worry of having to relink or make any other sort of modification? Or can I trust that if things appear normal, they are?

Thanks,
Rich Janson

Hi Tom,

I know this is not the place to put such a query.But as things stand, I had to come to you.The problem is we are trying to call 32-bit C libraries from Oracle(PL/SQl) 10g(64-bit) and as a result,it throws the following error:

ORA-06522 : Error loading external library
ld.so.1:fatal:cps_lib.so:wrong elfclass:ELFCLASS32

What we could make out was that it was looking for 64-bit library and found 32-bit ones.We are working on Solaris 9 and tried to create 64-bit versions of the same.But there,we get the error,while compiling and building

ld.so.1:fatal:cps_lib_test.o:wrong elfclass:ELFCLASS64

We tried modifying LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include 32-bit libraries but that is not the solution we are looking for.Couls that also be aproblem of C-libraries being of 32-bit,that are being linked.

I would be extremely glad if you could help us with that.

If I ma running solaris OS 64 bit and running oracle 9i (9.2.0.5)

When i log into sqlplus this shows:

007-f07: sqlplus "/ as sysdba"
 
SQL*Plus: Release 9.2.0.5.0 - Production on Sun Dec 10 15:49:27 2006
 
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.
 
 
Connected to:
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.5.0 - Production
With the Partitioning and Oracle Data Mining options
JServer Release 9.2.0.5.0 - Production
 
SQL>

How can I confirm Oracle 9i I am running with 32-bit or 64-bit?

I read some of the comments above but they didn't help. 

The answer was not understood,
I am trying to find an answer to a question "How do i know the system running on 32 bit or 64 bit version".
There was an answer for that in this column, but it has let me get more confused by seeing the answer. So please try to give a better solution where one can understand that.

describe v$sql
...
ADDRESS RAW(8)
...
Each RAW byte represents 8 bits.
So RAW(8) * 8 = 64-bit addressing used by Oracle to find things in the SGA. The column will be a RAW(4) on 32-bit systems.

it is about addressability primarily - how much memory can you address with 32bits vs 64bits.

That was a response you gave above. OK, but what about secondary issues?

We are currently running 9.2.0.8 on Solaris 9 and 10 machines using 32 bit Oracle. If we switch to 64 bit are we linking to different libraries in Solaris? If so isn't it quite possible that you could experience significant performance differences?

As a DBA I have always responded with the addressability answer when it came to 32 versus 64 bit. Given the changes in hardware and OS technology should that remain the main criteria?

Hi Tom.
I want to ask about a compatibility of backup and recovery between 32-bit and 64-bit oracle.
I made a backup of 64 bit 10g database and tried to recover it on 32 bit oracle. the recovery was successful. But before I did it, I was suspicious of if 32 bit oracle would recognize a backup of 64 bit machine..
As I said, the result was successful but I wonder..
Is it possible that any problem could happen?

Hello Tom,

I hope you help me in this as you usually do.

I have the following situation:

Oracle Database 9i R2 installed on Windows 2000 AS which is running on HP Server with the following specification:
CPU: 4 (32 bit) CPUs Pentium IV 2.6 HT
RAM: 4 GB
Hard Drives: 8 Hard drives with RAID 10

This server is dedicated to the Oracle Database which the users are accessing it locally and from the Internet.

However, once the sessions connected to the server started to reach 600 or little more we start to have the error:
ORA-12500: TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process

I have read about the 4GB Tunning and how to allow Oracle Process in Windows to grow more than the 2 GB limit.

I have added the switch /3GB to the boot.ini in Windows and things have improved

The sessions go beyond the 700 even 800 concurrent sessions.

However, now we have reached more than 980 concurrent sessions and the Oracle Database started to display the same error "ORA-12500: TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process"

This is in addition when we start to go more than 850 or little more, the users who connect to the database take longer time to connect than before.

I have monitored Oracle from Oracle Enterprise Manager and Statspack reports in peak working hours. The CPU usage is just around 50% and IO seems to be acceptable. I felt it is a listener and RAM problem

1) For the listener, I have added a new listener
I have dedicated the web users to connect only through the new listener while the local users connect through the default listener. The connection is much better and it is fast as before.

2) For "ORA-12500: TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process" error, I believe I have reached the threshold of the server. I believe we have used all the RAM dedicated to Oracle (3GB) and Oracle can not allocate more RAM to the clients.

Now, if the previous was correct, I am thinking in of the following:

a) Switch to Shared Server mode instead of Dedicated mode. I will enlarge the Large Pool in order to hold all the client sessions and to avoid allocating session in the shared pool. I am thinking to have 10 dispatchers and 1200 shared servers.

b) Switch to Linux, and therefore we will not have (oracle.exe) only. We will have many processes for users and background processes. But I do not know how much additional users we might have by switching to Linux. Moreover, the DBA know nothing about Linux!

c) Purchase a new hardware with 64 bit CPUs and 64 bit OS, and install 64 bit Oracle Database on this server. This way we can scale to much more users since the oracle.exe process can grow to a much larger size than the 32 bit one


d) Go for RAC. Purchasing a new server and configure the new server with the old in RAC environment, and therefore we can scale for more users. But we still need a shared storage (SAN for example). The cost here seems high!!

Too many options, and I am really confused regarding them. Which one to go???

I hope you help me here and I do hope you have a creative solution

Thanks

Dear Tom,
Is it possible to install Oracle 10.2.0.5 for 64 bit windows on Windows 2003 32 Bit system? Our production DB is migarting to 10.2.0.5.0 64 bit but we have Win 2003 32 bit on testing envionment. 10.2.0.5.0 is not available for 32 bit windows.

Thanks in advance.

Dear Tom,
Sorry for previous question. I tried to install 64 bit Oracle 10.2.0.5.0 Windows version on 32 but Win 2003 and within a second it flagged a message saying the oracle version was incomaptible with my current OS.

In future I'll take care to post a query after giving it a try.

A test environment that is radically different from the 'real' environment isn't a test environment

Very true, but unfortunately also very common.

Please let me the after effects of using 32 Bit Oracle on 64 Bit Windows 2003 server.

We need to use higher SGA more than 4GB but the application is unable to connect to 64 bit Oracle.

I have a C++ Application whose dll was giving an error an oracle dll (orasql10.dll ) is invalid. The application team has suggested to use 32 bit Oracle as application worked fine with 32 bit Oracle.

I have a 64 bit Windows 8 Pro machine that has Oracle 64 bit (11g) and Informatica 64 bit 9.1

I have not been able to connect Informatica to the Oracle database as the Informatica wizard opens with a 32 bit ODBC connector.

Somewhere I was suggested to download the Oracle 32 bit client as I was told that it can act as a bridge between 32 bit ODBC libraries and a 64 bit oracle database.

I have downloaded the client but I just don't know how to make the connection.

My question is can you help?

Ravi

Hi , I hav oracle 10g client version 10.2 on 32 bit . Can i install it on windows 64 bit operating system .Can i install and will it work ?? please let me know

Ravi,

See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942976

You have to use the correct ODBC Admin tool. The link above provides all of the info.