First Things First
At UKOUGs’ Back to Basics Special Event held in London today (Mar 24th), Niall Litchfield presented a very worthwhile session on “Getting the Basics Right”.
Now I’ve been more of a SQL Server DBA in recent years than I have an Oracle one, so this session was a welcomed reminder of the simple things to look for in ensuring your DB infrastructure is performant, efficient, effective and, I guess most importantly able to avoid failure!
Niall is a valued member of the Oracle community and in his role as a consultant often gets called in to ‘healthcheck’ databases for various customers.
Niall split his presentation into two parts :-
The first was the bread and butter of a DBA’s role – BASE – Backup/Activity/Space/Errors
Running through, what most Oracle DBAs would take for granted, areas like:-
- testing backups
- testing restores (probably more important than testing the actual backups?)
- running in Archivelog mode (do you need to be?)
- backing up redo logs (again – why ?)
- managing your redo
- importance of measuring business transactions and response times
- managing space on your database (both rdbms and OS !)
- the need to ensure the alert log and trace files are monitored and read frequently.
The second area he touched upon was – ASP – Applications/Security/Performance
To be honest, its these three areas that bosses and the powers that be at your company are probably more concerned with.
Topics covered here included :-
- importance of scrutinising your application logs
- general DB security – users/passwords/roles (certainly made me re-evaluate what we have back at camp again !)
- baselining for performance measuring and monitoring
It was good to hear someone talking about real basic Oracle – as I said, I’ve been out of the hands-on Oracle technical arena for a couple of years now – I need to get back into it and this session helped remind me of the importance of certain tasks and why Oracle invented certain functionality !
If you’re an Oracle DBA – get involved in the UKOUG – speakers like Niall regularly present at these events and are able to share their knowledge and valuable experiences.
