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 does a DBA do all day?


Responsibilities include installing, configuring, and managing the database, and these responsibilities can be divided into tasks scheduled to occur at certain intervals. This is a generalized list and, depending on your environment, may or may not be applicable. Most of the outlined tasks will be investigated further in later chapters in the book.

Monitoring and Log Rotation tasks can be done with Enterprise Manager, Grid Control, Unix shell scripting, DBMS_Scheduler, Perl, third-party database tools, or a combination of any of these.

Prioritizing tasks—daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly

Let's run through the priority tasks you need to cover. Scheduling will depend on your environment, application needs, and overall job priorities.

Daily

  • Backups—these are usually incremental or cumulative, weekly fulls, and logs are archived and e-mailed to DBA upon failure

  • Database Alert Logs—such as ORA-errors, automatic notifications through e-mail, pagers

  • ADRCI—Automatic Repository Utility and Log Rotation

  • Operating System File space, CPU and I/O statistics—depends on system admin support

  • SQL Tuning Sets—Top 5 to 10 SQL statements

  • Corruption—RMAN logs, export and/or datapump logs, dbverify, v$database_block_corruption

  • Tablespace growth—Extension, Partition Management, Temporary Tablespace, Undo

  • Data Guard—Log Shipping/Application in Synch

  • SQL*NET Listener Logs—intrusion detection

  • Audit trails and logs—intrusion detection, removal of unused accounts

  • Core Dumps and User Dumps—file space, Oracle bugs

  • New account creation—should be at least partially automated

  • Personnel security changes—At least 24 hours notice

  • Migrate schema and code changes or ad hoc SQL updates

  • Large table growth, coalescing tablespace

  • Keeping a log of daily changes to the database—publishing it for certain IT staff

Weekly

  • Backups—usually full

  • Cloning for non-production databases—automated or scripted

  • Tablespace growth—daily rolled up to weekly

  • Oracle upgrade or patch set Migration Projects—Milestone updates

  • Data Guard site testing

  • Check for updates from My Oracle Support—new patches, updates, or news releases

  • Local Intranet updates on operational procedures

Monthly

  • Cloning for non-production databases—automated or scripted

  • Monitoring tablespace growth—weekly rolled up to monthly

  • Trends and forecasts—CPU utilization, I/O stats, logons

  • Password changes on production—sys, system, wallet, schema, grid control, OAS

  • Oracle licensing usage and high water marks

  • Practicing recovery scenarios

Quarterly

  • Applying CPUs and PSUs into production with planned downtime. Applying CPUs, PSUs, one-offs into non-production instances

  • Monitoring tablespace growth—monthly rolled up to yearly

  • Oracle training updates—Oracle University (online or in-class), books, informal meetings

  • Trends and forecast rollups

Yearly

  • Tablespace growth—yearly report

  • Trends and forecast rollups

  • Attend Oracle-oriented conferences—regional or national Oracle user groups

  • Oracle upgrades with planned downtime—version + patch sets + PSUs + one-offs

  • Software licensing and warranty renewals

  • Hardware evaluation and replacement

  • SSL Certificate renewals, Oracle Wallets

Yes, these look like a daunting number of tasks that need to be accomplished, but you will have help in the form of tools such as OEM, Grid Control, third-party monitoring, or home-grown scripts. That is why I will reiterate that automating these tasks is of paramount importance.