Recently, while
preparing for a new engagement, I was re-familiarizing myself with Oracle
because the application(s) I will be working with require an RDBMS and the
client has chosen Oracle.
So, because I have experienced Oracle installations in the past, I decided not to install Oracle on my laptop. Instead, I planned to install it on a virtual machine (vm).
Now if you've ever worked with a vm, you know the first thing I had to do was create it... (if you haven't worked with vms, I recommend you check out VMWare). Just for completeness, the vm system was planned to be Windows 2003 R2, the latest version of Oracle, and Vignette Records and Documents v7.3.1.
Since we use vms quite frequently, I have a set of commonly used "base" vms with the operating system (OS) already installed (and a few development tools like Adobe PDF Reader, WinZip, and Eclipse), so I just started with that. I built these vms with 10GB hard disk. That makes the vm fairly easy enough to copy (to either a shared drive or a 16GB flash drive and large enough to load the software we work with. So far, that has been workable... that is, until now.
The Oracle 11g download (Windows 32-bit) is 1.73 GB in size.. AND, it's a ZIP file. That's the installation file! I'll spare all the details of getting this monster software installed. However, to get it into the vm, unzipped, and installed, I had to remove all 'other' software installed except the OS and when it was done (btw, I installed the standard edition, not the enterprise edition), I was left with less than 200 MB free! After deleting the ZIP & installation files and configuring a new, basic database within Oracle, I was left with 1.67 GB free out of 10 GB. That's right, just the OS and the 'standard' edition of Oracle - more than 8GB disk space required.
And there's wonder in the industry why software development is so difficult...
Exactly how much is 8 GB anyway? Does anyone really have a good feel for this number? Or is it just a number? Trying to wrap my head around 8 GB reminds me of my high school days trying to understand Avogadro's number. In case you don't know what that is, look here. Avogadro's constant is 6 x 10e23... that is 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or about that much).
So, 8 GB seems relatively small compared to that, but still it's a hard number to conceptualize... 8,000,000,000 bytes (and a byte is 8 bits). So, this is the equivalent of about 8,000 uncompressed novels or about 10 2hr movies.
When I think back on my career, I'm floored by these numbers - these sizes. We have definitely supersized ourselves in the IT industry. We need to go on a diet, but not just a diet of size - a diet of complexity. If we did that, software quality would go up because there is a direct correlation between complexity and software quality.
Stop supersizing your code.
So, because I have experienced Oracle installations in the past, I decided not to install Oracle on my laptop. Instead, I planned to install it on a virtual machine (vm).
Now if you've ever worked with a vm, you know the first thing I had to do was create it... (if you haven't worked with vms, I recommend you check out VMWare). Just for completeness, the vm system was planned to be Windows 2003 R2, the latest version of Oracle, and Vignette Records and Documents v7.3.1.
Since we use vms quite frequently, I have a set of commonly used "base" vms with the operating system (OS) already installed (and a few development tools like Adobe PDF Reader, WinZip, and Eclipse), so I just started with that. I built these vms with 10GB hard disk. That makes the vm fairly easy enough to copy (to either a shared drive or a 16GB flash drive and large enough to load the software we work with. So far, that has been workable... that is, until now.
The Oracle 11g download (Windows 32-bit) is 1.73 GB in size.. AND, it's a ZIP file. That's the installation file! I'll spare all the details of getting this monster software installed. However, to get it into the vm, unzipped, and installed, I had to remove all 'other' software installed except the OS and when it was done (btw, I installed the standard edition, not the enterprise edition), I was left with less than 200 MB free! After deleting the ZIP & installation files and configuring a new, basic database within Oracle, I was left with 1.67 GB free out of 10 GB. That's right, just the OS and the 'standard' edition of Oracle - more than 8GB disk space required.
And there's wonder in the industry why software development is so difficult...
Exactly how much is 8 GB anyway? Does anyone really have a good feel for this number? Or is it just a number? Trying to wrap my head around 8 GB reminds me of my high school days trying to understand Avogadro's number. In case you don't know what that is, look here. Avogadro's constant is 6 x 10e23... that is 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or about that much).
So, 8 GB seems relatively small compared to that, but still it's a hard number to conceptualize... 8,000,000,000 bytes (and a byte is 8 bits). So, this is the equivalent of about 8,000 uncompressed novels or about 10 2hr movies.
When I think back on my career, I'm floored by these numbers - these sizes. We have definitely supersized ourselves in the IT industry. We need to go on a diet, but not just a diet of size - a diet of complexity. If we did that, software quality would go up because there is a direct correlation between complexity and software quality.
Stop supersizing your code.
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