Moodle 2.4 with Oracle RAC

Moodle 2.4 with Oracle RAC

by Antonio Piedras -
Number of replies: 5

Hi people,
in my institution that uses Moodle 1.9 with Postgres database are planning to migrate to Moodle 2.4, with a fresh installation, this summer. One of the option for the Back-End is change to Oracle RAC for have high disponibility.
Anybody can tell some information about the performance of Moodle 2.x with Oracle database? Is a good option?
My institution have 85.000 students, 5.200 teachers and more than 9.000 Moodle courses.
Anything that you can tell me about this will be welcome.

Thanks in advance

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In reply to Antonio Piedras

Re: Moodle 2.4 with Oracle RAC

by Moo pin -

Hi Antonio, I've no experience with Moodle and DB Clustering.

We were working in a big project several years with almost every Oracle Technology (OAS, OID, ODB...). Our opinion: those are complex, very complex and their learning curve is considerable.

Thus you already have skills on PostgreSQL, Why not to considerate PostgresSQL Cluster (as OpenUniversity says in this presentation )? Any specific reason? I imagine you know this spanish presentation.

 

We're studying a similar migration right now, but in a before step: from 6000 to about 60000 users. Our decision now is to migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL, do you recommend this decision? I suppose yes, but, why not clustering with PostgreSQL. We have no dedicated DBA role and we've some doubts if PosgreSQL administration could imply a 100% focus for one person.

Regards

In reply to Moo pin

Re: Moodle 2.4 with Oracle RAC

by Antonio Piedras -

Hi Moo,

Postgres is a good database but doesn't have high disponibility by now. And this is a vital feature for us, because our campus is growing year by year.
One feature that is good for Postgres is implement a connection pool, like pgbouncer for example. That is very, very recomended, because the performance of the database is more good and the resources of the back-end better used.

Cheers

In reply to Antonio Piedras

Re: Moodle 2.4 with Oracle RAC

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

What do you mean by 'disponibility'? I don't think that is an English word.

Moodle on Oracle is very slow, because there have to be lots of work-arounds to deal with all the ways Oracle differs from standard SQL. Don't go there if you can possibly avoid it.

(Oh, looks like it is an Engish word: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disponible - but a very obscure one.)

In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle 2.4 with Oracle RAC

by Antonio Piedras -

Tim,

I meant: availability

Cheers

In reply to Antonio Piedras

Re: Moodle 2.4 with Oracle RAC

by Simon Story -

Hi Antonio,

Postgres is very reliable and does support a type high availibility. It has several methods of replication that mean you can keep a slave database up to date with changes from your master.

The streaming replication is quite easy to set up and works extremely well. http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Streaming_Replication

However, implementing failover (Automatic or not) if there is a problem is for the administrators of the database to do.