Book Image

Oracle Database 11g : Underground Advice for Database Administrators

By : April Sims
Book Image

Oracle Database 11g : Underground Advice for Database Administrators

By: April Sims

Overview of this book

Today DBAs are expected to deploy and manage large databases with quality service and little to no downtime. The DBA's main focus is on increasing productivity and eliminating idle redundancy throughout the enterprise. However, there is no magic set of best practices or hard and fast rules that DBAs need to follow, and this can make life difficult. But if DBAs follow some basic approaches and best practices, tasks can be performed more efficiently and effectively.This survival guide offers previously unwritten underground advice for DBAs. The author provides extensive information to illuminate where you fit in, and runs through many of the tasks that you need to be watchful of, extensively covering solutions to the most common problems encountered by newcomers to the world of Oracle databases.The book will quickly introduce you to your job responsibilities, as well as the skills, and abilities needed to be successful as a DBA. It will show you how to overcome common problems and proactively prevent disasters by implementing distributed grid computing—scalable and robust—with the ability to redeploy or rearchitect when business needs change. Reduce downtime across your enterprise by standardizing hardware, software, tools, utilities, commands, and architectural components.This book will also help you in situations where you need to install Oracle Database 11g or migrate to new hardware making it compliant with a Maximum Availability Architecture. By the end of this book you will have learned a lot and gained confidence in your abilities. You will be armed with knowledge as to which tools are best used to accomplish tasks while proactively moving towards an automated environment.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Oracle Database 11g—Underground Advice for Database Administrators
Credits
About the author
About the reviewers
Preface
Index

Automating day-to-day tasks


Options to automate the DBA tasks mentioned in the previous chapter include some of the following:

  • DBMS_SCHEDULER: Oracle-supplied PL/SQL package that comes preinstalled

  • OS scheduling commands: Certain tasks such as monitoring file space usage and removing old trace/log files are often scheduled using something like Unix cron or the Windows at command. The best options include tasks that need to run no matter the database state—down, up, or mounted.

  • OEM Grid Control Intelligent Agent: Requires installation and configuring to run OS type commands. A very useful Enterprise-wide monitoring tool but quite an investment in time to configure and maintain for multiple servers.

Let's look at an example task and apply it to each of the three types of automation mentioned above: Monitoring the Database Alert Log.

DBMS_SCHEDULER

DBMS_SCHEDULER, along with the power of PL/SQL, provides a mechanism for automating some of the daily tasks mentioned earlier in this chapter. Using...