Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

by Victor Burguillos -
Number of replies: 6

Hi,

I need now if is possible to install Moodle 1.9 o any version with oracle 10G.

Any aditional requeriments.

Thanks

Regards.

VB

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In reply to Victor Burguillos

Re: Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

by Iñaki Arenaza -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Hi Victor,

yes, it is possible. We are running one of our production Moodle setups with Oracle 10g. As long as you have the oci8po PHP module installed and configured, there are no additional requirements.

One important note though: the oci8po module of PHP versions later than 5.2.1 is broken (as of today), so we are running with PHP 5.2.5 but using the oci8po.dll from 5.1.2 (whithout any problem so far).

Saludos. Iñaki.
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In reply to Iñaki Arenaza

Re: Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

by Martín Langhoff -

Some more notes

  • It tends to be slow if the DB server is separete, mainly due to network latency. This is related to how Oracle deals with CLOBS. Oracle 11g implements an extension to the SQL*Net protocol that is supposed to fix the problem, once the PHP driver supports it. I've been trying to hack the PHP driver to support it -- but have not had enough time to finish with it.
  • I have some patches that make things quite a bit faster if you have rcache. Some have been merged into 1.9 but others are delayed to 2.0. See this branch http://git.catalyst.net.nz/gitweb?p=moodle-r2.git;a=shortlog;h=mdl19-dbperf
  • If you are not using the patches above, a good trick is to change the config table so that the value column is a VARCHAR(4000) instead of a CLOB.

With the bit of time I had last year Oracle performance for 1.9 improved quite abit. If I could get some more time to hack on the PHP OCI8 driver, I'm sure we can get Oracle on par with Pg and MySQL...

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Re: Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

by Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
If I could get some more time to hack on the PHP OCI8 driver, I'm sure we can get Oracle on par with Pg and MySQL...

Err... I bet on we won't. One "mojito" for the next Spanish MoodleMoot, agree ML ? wink Let's call it the "Oraclethon" ! big grin

Ciao smile

P.S.: Anyway, Martin & Catalyst has really done one amazing job for Moodle 1.9 and Oracle now performs really better. Yes
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In reply to Eloy Lafuente (stronk7)

Re: Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

by Martín Langhoff -
Not fair... I owe you many mojitos already! smile

Oracle is not my favourite, but I do like seeing Moodle go fast fast FAST -- it was quite a bit of fun to get things going faster on OCI8.

The client libraries in 11g have this thing called OCI_ATTR_DEFAULT_LOBPREFETCH_SIZE that was designed to address this exact scenario. I've experimented a bit with it, but it needs more time.
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In reply to Martín Langhoff

Re: Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

by Wen Hao Chuang -
ML, btw just curious, what's the largest size (# of courses, # of users, size of log table or quiz attempt table..etc.) of database that you guys have handled so far on MySQL or Oracle, and what are your findings so far (performance-wise, MySQL vs. Oracle)? Thanks! smile
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In reply to Martín Langhoff

Re: Databases: Install Moodle with Oracle 10 G

by D P -
Hi there,

sorry to dig out this old thread...

Our setup:
DB: Oracle 10G 10.2.0.2.0
Webserver: Solaris Coolstack
Moodle 1.9.2+: 14000+users - 400+courses

Last week, our setup hung at ~60 concurrent users/min.
We now changed the config-table-clob to varchar...and so far it looks ok...
Why isn't this important information in the oracle moodle-docs (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_Oracle_for_PHP)?!
Do we have to change it back to clob, when we update to the next moodle-version?
Should we also change the cache_text-clob to varchar...? (Or other clobs in tables?)
Why does Moodle use clobs and not varchar2(4000) fields at all?

Are there any other patches or informations from you core-moodle-developers we could use for our setup before moodle 2.0 is released...?!
Maybe other blog-articles, docs, forum posts, etc. about moodle-oracle-performance we here don't know about...?!

Thanks for your help!

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