Borklog: One entry

13 March 2002

I've been studying for an Oracle DBA test recently, and I was struck by a curiosity. In software "engineering" we're always taught to hide implementation details, to wrap implementation details behind an API so that we can change them if need be (or maybe to hide our own incompetence). The Oracle software exposes a huge number of implementation details. "buffer cache latches must cover at least 50 blocks", "there are at most 10 DBWn processes", "indexes are B trees with this structure". And yet Oracle is a very successful system.

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