Re: [Webct-admin] DBA effort required for WebCT 6

[John D. <joh...@ut...>]

We're running Oracle on Solaris, but it should not be too different.

We started the upgrade project in July (when CE 6 was released), started
instructor training and content upload in October, and went live with it
for students this term, starting two weeks ago.

I'm grateful that my department has an Oracle DBA that I was able to
utilize.  I've used quite a bit of his time in the last four weeks, both
in monitoring and tweaking our database.  During installation, you and
your DBA should plan on spending at least a week getting a database set up
and *tested* (or two systems, one for testing/recovery and one for
production if you have the hardware and license).  The installation guide
is pretty straight forward, but this is when you will need to discuss
availability, growth needs, and disk configuration.  Make sure you can add
disk without much downtime.  Run the check scripts available for download
from WebCT.  Make sure you have monitoring tools working and ready for
when you go live.  You should also test your backups and do a full restore
from backup to become familiar with the process (even though you hope to
never have to do it) and to make sure it works.

You should also plan on having your DBA monitor the database closely as
you start to use the server.  We were caught off-guard by the amount of
data generated when we started seeing many instructors upload their
content, and were seeing as many as 36 log switches per hour and 800,000
blocks per second logical I/O.  Usage patters change as the term goes on,
and we're seeing them for the first time this term.  By the end of the
term we hope to have a good idea of what will happen from now on.

So to answer your questions, for a school of 28,000 students and 1,500
classes in WebCT, a full time DBA for two weeks to discuss needs and do
the installation and testing, and maybe 15-20 hours per week your first
few weeks of the term (two before, two after the start), but this depends
on what your upgrade plan is (all at once or gradually) and how many users
and classes you have.


  John Desha
    Office of Information Technology
    University of Utah


On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Kevin Lowey wrote:

> Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:19:07 -0600 (CST)
> From: Kevin Lowey <Kev...@Us...>
> To: WebCT Administrator's List <Web...@li...>
> Subject: [Webct-admin] DBA effort required for WebCT 6
>
> Hi,
>
> This question is specifically for people who are implementing or soon plan
> to implement WebCT 6 on Linux, using an Oracle database.
>
> I'm trying to estimate the DBA effort required for the WebCT system so I
> can include it in our service plan. Can anyone tell me roughly how many
> hours per week on average the DBAs work on WebCT 6 related activities?
>
>   - during the implementation phase?
>   - during the operations phase?
>
> Thanks,
>
>  - Kev...@Us... - Phone: (306) 966-4826 - Fax: 966-4938
>    U of S WebCT Coordination: http://webct.usask.ca/
>    U of S Web Coordination:   http://www.usask.ca/web_project/
>    Kevin's Personal Web Site: http://duke.usask.ca/~lowey/
>
>    "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans"
>                                      - John Lennon
>
>
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