Oracle Rant

I just recently got RMAN working with NetBackup. I have been asked to document this at work . Coincidently it makes for a great blog post!

#1. It is very important that you document things and how they are done so that other people can learn how to do them, know how it is done, and you can have a standard based off of this. It also gives you a baseline to improve upon. If you don’t believe me, read the book “The Goal”.

First, let me explain why we used RMAN and then why we linked it with Veritas. RMAN gives you so much flexibility and control of your backups. It might seem mundane at first, but once you get into the thick of it, you realize how powerful it is. There is an interface to RMAN through database control / grid control but I think Oracle still could improve greatly upon it. They leave many options out, but if the goal is simplicity and to get someone to do it, it is very powerful in that regard. I guess something is better than nothing, but really it’s pretty good but could be much better. How’s that?

RMAN also checks for corrupted blocks and can assist you with recovering them. It can keep track of block changes through a tracking file. This way it does not have to scan every block to see if it has changed. Even more powerful, if you have not compressed your backups, you can merge your level 1 and your level 0 to create a new level 0 backup. This can greatly speed up recovery times. I could go on and on but RMAN is a very powerful utility. I will blog more about it later.

Second, why did we want to link it with Veritas Netbackup? Well Veritas Netbackup is the corporate standard. You could just as well link it with EMC Networker and Tivoli Storage manager and any other backup vendor that makes a library to link RMAN with the MML. Before, we would have to have the backup person pull our Oracle backups off disk or we would execute a script after they went to disk. The problem is when the system crashes and we have to wake our backup person in the middle of the night to restore our files. If we find out it is the wrong one, we wake him up again. Recoveries take longer and the company loses money. By integrating RMAN with the Veritas Backup Agent we can now restore without having to wakeup our Backup Admin. Why? Because RMAN talks directly with Veritas when it backs up so that it is able to tell Veritas what it needs when it is time to recover.

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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! : )

This is my first blog entry. We just got done having the Suncoast Oracle Users Group Technology Day which was pretty good. We had over 260 attendees which was up from 175 last year. It was even more work too! I’m just glad it is over : ). Did I mention it was a lot of work? Oh well, there is always next year, right? : )

We have a good board but this is what it entailed in case anyone decides they want to do the same thing. First of all, the event costs nothing, so all the money must come from sponsors. We had to come up with a theme, get the speakers, get the topics, get the sponsors. Create contracts, find a facility, get material printed, get goodies to give away, work with the facility and sponsors and speakers to lay everything out. Do Audio and Video. Try to organize everything. Pay for food, materials, goodies (like bags and shirts). I could keep going but you get the idea, it was a lot of work but definitely worth it.

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