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

What do I do before starting a restore and recovery?


Hopefully, you have taken the time to practice several different types of recovery scenarios before having to do this for real in a production situation. This can be extremely nerve wracking. So take some time to settle down before starting, as you will need to think clearly. Don't leave the scene of the crime until things are normal, even if it turns out badly. Here are some generalized steps on how to proceed when the database goes down:

  • Determine what is actually wrong before continuing

    Error messages don't always point to exactly what is wrong. They can be vague or general unless some sort of tracing is enabled. First, start with the database alert log and check for the existence of core dumps. Oracle has designed an RMAN-directed Failure Adviser that can be used in conjunction with manual procedures, but the adviser won't replace any of the steps in this list.

    Run the recovery_status.sql script provided for this chapter. That might help...