My client is a CRM application provider who usually installs their application
running with MS SQL Server. This time thy have a client that is willing to use
Oracle, so I'd believe the performance should be much better than usual, but
it's not the case. They did their best without an Oracle DBA, following
external instructions from partners via email. The situation is kind of
critical right now because the performance is not good and the project is in
danger, so they asked for my help.
So I'm starting to work with this database (Oracle running on a Windows
environment) behind a CRM application with 20/30 users. The application
usually opens 6 to 10 database connections for each user, so the amount of
connections is normally about 200.
Most of the time the application is processing transactions, but it's usual to
see several times a day big reports being run by the supervisors.
The performance is not good and the database is running on a 1 Gb RAM Pentium
IV, configured to work with shared server processes (I believe it's a mistake
though I don't have much experience in shared server mode so I might be wrong).
Do you think that a database with these characteristics should be in a P-IV
with 1 Gb of RAM running in shared server mode, or it would be better to
change it to a dedicated server environment (and/or may be add some RAM).
At the same time, what is the minimal ammount of RAM that you recommend for
such a thing? My customer's customer is about to run a test on a separated
server, so I'm building a new environment from scratch. The additional problem
is that the test server has only 256 Mb of RAM (is it me, or are they shooting
to kill?).
I hope you can give me some advice.
Thanks in advance,

--Claudio

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