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

Flash(back) Recovery Area (FRA)


You will see the FRA referred to as either the Flash Recovery Area (newer form) versus the older version called Flashback Recovery Area. They are the same thing, though Oracle decided to shift the emphasis so that the FRA should be used for all files associated with backup and recovery and not just Flashback logs.

If a mandatory archivelog destination becomes full at the disk level, it can cause the database to hang, as there is no room to write the archived log. FRA as an archivelog or flashback log destination can hang if you fail to accurately predict the amount of space needed to implement it. There are several recommendations from Oracle as what to store in this area, because it is primarily meant for backup and recovery files:

  • Current control file

  • Online redo logs

  • Archived redo logs

  • Control file autobackups

  • Data file and control file copies

  • Backup pieces

  • Foreign archived redo log (logical standby database in continuous Log Miner mode. See MAA, Chapter 4)

Space...