10G OEM Grid Control R2 New Features and Oracle’s Newest Ace

This is a title I am proud of. I have been working with Oracle for a long time. I kind of view the Ace title as a validation of my life's work. I am hoping that the Oracle Ace and my Oracle Senior Level Instructor's titles help build my credibility with new and returning visitors to this site. I learned during my teaching career that if the folks you are trying to transfer information to don't trust your technical background or technical expertise, you lose both their attention and their enthusiasm to learn. One of the great benefits I had as an instructor was that I did not teach full time. My duties at the training center were split between teaching and doing day-to-day DBA work for our remote DBA services sister company. I made sure to mention that during class by stating "As soon as were done with this class, I'll being doing this exact set of steps in my office for one of our customers." Note to my ex-students, I actually DID do those things.

When you look at the DBAs who have the title, it's like the "who's who" of Oracle. You have folks like Tom Kyte, Mark Rittman, Ken Jacobs, Jonathan Lewis and Arup Nanda. These are guys that I view as the absolute experts of our profession. Well, now it is the "who's who" and the "who's he". When I found out I was nominated I was a nervous wreck. After I found out that I received the title, I was ecstatic. The Oracle ACE, getting my senior-level Oracle instructor title and winning the Oracle Instructor Quality award are the three greatest accomplishments of my career. I know my blog on DBAZine certainly helped. I would like to thank everyone at DBAZine for all of their help, Steve Clark from Oracle for nominating me and the folks that voted to allow me to join the Oracle Ace ranks.

10G Grid Control R2 New Features
Instead of delving immediately into a feature-by-feature discussion, I thought it might be a good idea to start this series of blogs with a description of some of the features we are interested in here at Giant Eagle. We should have the new release installed and configured in our test environment within the next week. In upcoming blogs, I'll provide you with a step-by-step demonstration on how use the new features. It will be the exact same approach I have taken in past blogs.

Target Groups
R2 allows users to define logical groupings of targets. Administrators are then able to run jobs and tasks across the entire group, as opposed to individual targets as we do in 10G R1. R2 provides a group dashboard that will provide users with the capability of reviewing status information and performing administrative tasks at the group level. The dashboard also provides drill down capabilities to individual targets.

We have applications that consist of multiple database, listener and application server targets. There are times when we need to shutdown all of the targets for a particular application. The grouping feature will allow us to treat the group of targets as a single unit. In addition, it seems to me that grouping the targets may simplify the presentation of multiple targets to the DBA. Like most shops, Giant Eagle DBAs are responsible for all targets for a given application. We intend to evaluate whether grouping all targets for an application simplifies the administrative process.

Execute SQL/Host Commands Across Multiple Targets
You were able to accomplish this in 9iOEM and 10G R1 by creating a job, embedding a SQL statement in it and having it access multiple databases. R2 provides a SQLPLUS like feature that allows a DBA to run SQL against multiple targets in parallel with near real time feedback.

I am often asked to provide information for all databases across the enterprise. Our security department performs audits to verify that we have the correct security patches installed, users that are no longer active are removed from the systems, database users have the correct authorities, etc.. This feature will allow us to quickly provide information from multiple databases. Sounds like a good feature to me.

Adaptive Thresholds
10G R1 allowed adminstrators to set performance metric thresholds. You were able to freeze a set of performance statistics (called a metric baseline) at a particular instant in time. You then defined a threshold percentage of deviation. If the performance statistics exceeded the threshold, 10GR1 would generate an alert that would notify the DBA of the exception.

I never found this feature to be enticing enough to implement in a production environment. We ran tests in our labs to determine if it worked and found that the feature "worked as advertised." But to ensure that the alert was not triggered during peak times, it was necessary for us to capture the statistics to set the baseline during those times of peak activity. As a result, the only time the thresholds were helpful was in comparing peak activity to the peak activity threshold. It was not as useful for non-peak times.

R2 provides adaptive thresholds that make the threshold settings more fluid in nature. The thresholds adapt to changes and usage, which should improve the benefits the feature provides. I'll let you know how it works in an upcoming blog.

SQL Detail/Session Detail Screens
The SQL Detail and Session Details screens have been updated to be more graphical in nature as well as provide more diagnostic information. The explain plans can be shown in a graphical display. This will be one of the first enhancements that we will test here at Giant Eagle.

ASH Reports
Since the AWR, by default, takes snapshots every 60 minutes, performance information could be up to 60 minutes old. As a result, snapshots do not contain enough information to allow administrators to perform analysis on the active workload currently being performed in the database system. Oracle10g R1 contained a new internal utility, called Active Session History, to provide administrators with access to current performance information.

Active Session History samples data from the V$SESSION dynamic performance table every second and stores the information in V$ACTIVE_SESSON_HISTORY. The information contains the events for which current sessions are waiting. The information pertains to active sessions only; information from inactive sessions is not recorded. The view contains one row per active session for each one-second sample. Administrators were able to access V$ACTIVE_SESSON_HISTORY as they would any other V$ dynamic performance table.

R2 contains a panel that allows administrators to generate ASH statistics reports. The report allows a DBA to view ASH statistics, including top SQL, top sessions, top waits, for any time period that has a set of corresponding statistics stored in the repository (default 1 week). This historical information will help administrators finally answer questions like, "My program ran long two days ago; can you fix it?"

Root Cause Analysis Functionality
R2 provides a new wizard-like feature that helps administrators drill down through diagnostic information until they find the root cause of a problem. I am VERY interested in evaluating this feature and will let you know the results as soon as we have them. Oh, one last thing… Oracle isn't trying to replace us with their administrative tools, they are just trying to simplify our jobs and reduce the amount of time we spend debugging problems.

Enterprise Reporting Features
Yahoo! (no, not the search engine..) I was just very excited when I found out that R2 contains an Enterprise Reporting tool. Oracle describes the feature as providing "Easy-access out-of-box reports for all Oracle components, reports on configuration, performance, service level, and audit".

The Enterprise Reporting feature is a graphical, report generation tool that allows users to create reports using any data that is stored in the Management Repository. The reports can be secured using the tool's secure publishing features. One of the first enhancements we will be testing.

SQL Access Advisor Enhancements
A few weeks ago someone asked how they could run the SQL Access Advisor on a single SQL statement. I showed them a way that unfortunately, wasn't straightforward or simple. R2's new single statement tuning feature allows administrators to quickly and easily tune a single SQL statement.

Automatic Segment Advisor
Administrators using R1 that wanted to activate the segment advisor to identify wasted space (and candidates for online segment shrink operations) were forced to manually run the Segment Advisor. R2 proactively idenfifies segments that have significant wasted space due to data fragmentation. As a result, manual execution of the Segment Advisor will only be needed during rare situations. For more information on the Segment Advisor please turn to my blog titled "The 10G Segment Adivisor".

Host Management
R2 improves Grid Control's ability to administer and monitor hardware platforms by providing file-level monitoring, remote command operations and remote file editing. Here's my personal opinion - the more non-Oracle administrative functions 10G Grid Control provides, the better off we are as administrators. If I can edit files, perform remote shell commands, etc.without leaving 10G Grid Control, why would I leave 10G Grid Control? I don't want to switch to different tools when I am administering an Oracle environment. An environment that includes a database AND an operating system.

Enterprise Storage Reports
R2 reports on disk allocation, disk utilization and roll-ups by location, line of business, application and vendor. Giant Eagle has many terabytes of disk currently allocated to the Oracle environment. In addition, we have just received another 10.2 terabytes of disk for our newest data warehouse, affectionately known as "Baby Huey". Any feature that allows us to better understand our disk allocations will generate a lot of interest here.

Monitoring Support for Non-Standard Targets
R2 now supports network devices and non-Oracle middleware. This includes performance and availability monitoring, reportting and customizable alerts.This could be fun. I can't wait to call one of our network geeks and tell them that one of their load balancers is offline. Their response to that question alone would be worth the effort it takes to install and configure this feature.

Collaboration Suite Management Features
I will be spending some dedicated time testing and blogging on this new feature set. We currently have a complex Collab Suite environment that includes multiple (numerous may be a better term) Application, Collab Suite, Portal and OID servers. You look at the data flow diagrams between these servers and you feel a little queasy. I am hoping that the new Collab Suite management feaures help to simplify this environment's administration and monitoring requirements.

Summary
Once again Oracle has provided me with a lot of interesting features that I can blog about. As I stated a few times in past blogs, we all must learn to effectively use 10G Grid Control to monitor and administer our environments - it is the future of database administration.