The Oracle community lost a valued contributor. Oracle author, presenter and educator Lex de Haan passed away after a battle with cancer. I intended to write about our Giant Eagle ASM test plan but it is important for me to take a few minutes to talk about Lex first. Look for my blog on our test plan in a day or two.

Let’s deviate from 10G EM R2 for a blog or two. As I mentioned in an earlier discussion, we are in the beginning stages of testing Oracle ASM here at Giant Eagle. I thought I would provide you with some general information on ASM and why we are interested in it. In my next blog, I’ll show you our ASM test plan.

I made the big-time! Tom Parrish recently interviewed me for a DBAZine Podcast. I think streaming audio Podcast’s are an exciting addition to the web experience. Tom and I talk about my newly received Oracle Ace title, technology advancements in the retail industry, blogging, outsourcing and the changing role of the DBA. Oh, and we also talk about what to do, and what NOT to do, when giving presentations.

One of the features that was missing in 10G R1 was a tool that allowed administrators to generate reports on system related information. 9I OEM's reporting feature could be described as somewhat rudimentary but it got the job done. That job was to quickly generate pre-created and AD-HOC reports using one, or more, database targets as input. Although 10G R1 is far superior to its 9I OEM counterpart, its reporting functionalities were limited.

10G Grid Control R2 comes to the rescue with a new reporting capability that makes 9I OEM's reporting capabilities pale in comparison. Let's face it, DBAs have too much to do. The less time we have to spend retrieving information we need to make decisions, the more time we have to make them.

Last week, we discussed 10G Grid Control R2’s feature that allows us to run host commands against multiple targets at the same time. 10G Grid Control R2 also provides an easy-to-use panel that allows administrators to run SQL scripts against multiple database targets simultaneously. Just like its host command counterpart, all we need to do is code up a SQL statement, choose a set of database targets, run the SQL against the multiple targets and review the output. Simple as can be.

A weird combination of topics to start the New Year on but I think it is important for us to cover a few interesting enhancements contained in 10G R2 Enterprise Manager.

In addition, we are starting our official ASM (Automatic Storage Management) evaluation project . The end result of the project would be the conversion of 10.2 Terabytes of disk to Oracle ASM. Could make for a very interesting set of blogs, don't you think?

This will be my last blog of 2005. I have been blogging on DBAZine for over a year now. I thought I would take one blog to quickly review where we have been and where we'll be going in 2006.

I intend to broaden our range of discussion topics in the upcoming year. But I also intend to dedicate numerous blogs to previously discussed topics including data warehouse administration, 10G Enterprise Manager and Oracle database 10G R2.

This is a weird combination of topics. We are currently installing and configuring the latest and greatest release of Oracle’s enterprise-wide monitoring and administration toolset, 10G Grid Control R2. I am very excited about the new features and functionality that this new release provides. Before we get into the nitty-gritty details about the release’s new feature set, I thought I would take one blog to discuss some of the features we are interested in.

The other topic is a quick announcement to let you know that I am Oracle’s newest Ace. A title that I am very proud to have.

I have always thought that a graphical display utility that compared performance statistics would be a worthwhile tool. You could compare the statistics captured from two sets of timelines and quickly identify the differences.

10G Grid Control provides a comparison utility that allows administrators to compare two sets of ADDM snapshots. Although it provides a very simple comparison at this time, it is certainly a step in the right direction. This blog will show you how to select the timelines and perform the comparison.

Now that we have learned how to create Statspack-Style performance reports from Automatic Workload Repository snapshots, let’s run an ADDM task and an intelligent advisor or two and let 10G Grid Control do the diagnostic grunt work for us. As I ranted in my previous blog, ADDM and the intelligent advisors are the future of database performance analysis. The era of relying totally on DBA experience and expertise to tune Oracle is rapidly drawing to a close.

We'll create a not-so mythical performance problem and use the output from an ADDM task to provide us with the diagnostic information and recommendations we need to solve the issue. Along the way we'll look at some of the different features and functionality that ADDM offers.