Oracle Rant

I will talk about some of the Oracle Automatic Database Management enhancements in Oracle Database 10g. The main idea behind these is to make the DBA more productive. I have used some of these and some I have not. I guess you could say I have one foot in the future and the other in the past. As I share my studying with you, perhaps I will start using some of these myself.

The first enhancement is the ADDM (Automatic Diagnostic Monitor). Now in order to use ADDM, you must have an Oracle Diagnostic Pack license. Typically you use and access ADDM through your database control environment but you can also access it via packages and procedures. By default ADDM runs every hour. It is dependent upon the AWR (Automatic Workload Repository), which is like statspack on steroids and also runs every hour by default. You need an Oracle Diagnostic Pack license to look at AWR snapshots. If you want to look at an AWR report then just run awrrpt.sql which is located in your rdbms/admin directory. I’ll do a post about doing statspack in a previous post, but I only look at statspack for pre 10g databases. Also, there is a new background process, MMON, which attaches directly to the SGA and gathers statistics rather than querying the data dictionary. Back to ADDM. ADDM diagnoses many types of performance issues. Those include:

• Configuration issues
• Improper application usage
• Expensive SQL statements
• I/O performance issues
• Locking issues
• Excessive parsing
• CPU bottlenecks
• Undersized memory allocation
• Connection management issues

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In Oracle 10g, there are several different ways of loading and unloading data. Prior to Oracle 10g the two methods outside of running queries were RMAN and import and export. In 10g RMAN still exists and is exanded upon. It is also the backup tool of choice for many DBAs as it actually simplifies things and gives you other benefits such a block corruption checking. Import and export are still there as well. Import will always be there but export will be going away. Why would they keep the import utility? Because you can export an Oracle 8i or 9i database and import it into Oracle 10g or the new 11g that will be coming out. Datapump is the new utility that replaces import and export.

So what has changed?

First of all, the command is different. To invoke export or import you would just use exp or imp. With datapump it is similar but follows with ‘dp’ for data pump: expdp and impdp. Also, if you are using new features such as Transparent Data Encryption, the old exp utility will not export encrypted columns. Your only choice is to use datapump in place of it. Datapump is also much faster than export and import as well as more flexible. You can run multiple jobs as well as run single jobs in parallel. You can also attach from jobs and detach from jobs.  You cannot use datapump to import an export from the traditional utilities. You can still use imp in Oracle 10g.

What does the datapump architecture look like?
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The Oracle 10g installation is much quicker than previous installations and much smaller too! With 9i, you needed to use 3 disks to do an install, with 10g, you only need one. What Oracle has done is separated the installs. To install the client, it has it’s own CD and to install the database, it has it’s own CD.

To install on Windows, it is pretty straight forward. You pop in the disk and go. With unix / linux / solaris you have to use XWindows. At home, many people just run the GUI that is installed with the Linux installation, but in most production environments the GUI and XWindows are not run on the server as to not impact performance. What you have to do is run an XWindows server such as exceed or cygwin on your machine if it is Linux, you can just use that.

At work I have a Windows XP laptop with Cygwin (free GUI), and I have a Linux laptop running Ubuntu. I have the Oracle Client installed on both (10.2.0.3) and SQL Developer (free IDE). Both work great. I’m not going to get into the actual XWindows and how to use it, but you can find it in Oracle’s installation documentation quite easily.

So what has changed with the 10g installation?

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I am currently an 8i and 9i OCP. I have procrastinated about upgrading my certification to 10g because I have been busy with the SOUG, work, and other things. I also setup a website at securitydb.com (that will get some attention as well) and I plan on focusing on that site as well. I am hoping that this becomes addicting. I am also hoping that it will inspire me to study and give me something to blog about.

My goal is to get 5 posts out this week about the 10g DBA OCP upgrade exam.

So what am I using to study for the exam? Well this will be the first post: Study Material!

The Oracle Education site explains what all the requirements of the exam are as well as where you can get some training and study material. Since I am self-studying, I have decided to just use the exam topics to guide me. To view those topics, click here.

Next, we can discuss where you can learn about those topics. One site that anyone working with Oracle cannot live without is the Oracle Documentation. The other website that Oracle provides is OTN (Oracle Technology Network). There are several books you can buy. I have chosen the OCP Oracle Database 10g: New Features for Administrators Exam Guide by Sam Alapati. So far, it looks like an excellent read. I will write a review on here and also post it at Amazon.com and our user group site SOUG.org. It looks like Sybex also has a book and Cramsession has a free studyguide to help you as well. As with any exam, do not depend on any one source for your study material. Chances are, they will miss something.

What I plan on blogging about next is Installation and New Feature Support for the 10g OCP. My plan is to have about 15-20 posts on the 10g OCP and my exam experience. I look forward to blogging about it and hope that this pushes me to get this done! : )