Off-line testing of technical changes

Unlike much of the more proprietary hardware and operating systems available, Intel-based hardware is comparatively inexpensive. Given some of the availability challenges presented by this platform, acquisition of a "spare box" to be used entirely for testing purposes is beneficial and affordable for most organizations with the capital to invest in ORACLE as a part of their core technology infrastructure. Ideally, this test box should be used by the DBA or designee for items such as the following:

1) Periodic recovery tests.

2) Testing of risky database maintenance procedures (ie. re-orgs, re-creation of control files, etc.).

3) Testing of database upgrades, patch applications, and modification of unfamiliar or obscure initialization parameters.

4) Testing of O/S upgrades, service packs, or other maintenance.

5) Conflict testing with non-ORACLE software.

A test box for these purposes will typically only need to support one user (the DBA), so a small, non-production grade server or even a extended desktop PC can be used for this purpose. As long as the box has enough resources to run NT Server, an ORACLE instance, and an SGA suitable for a single user, then it can be utilized for the above purposes. Ideally, enough disk should be available to allow a full recovery test, although at least a partial recovery test can provide a reasonable indication of the integrity of database backup procedures. The ability to test software, maintenance routines, and detect software conflicts offline can have a significant positive impact on the overall environment at a cost much less than that associated with production (and in some cases, development) database outages.