10 Things I like about Oracle 10G Part 1
Let's consider this blog to be a review of sorts. Oracle 10G has been Oracle's flagship release for some time now. I thought it might be beneficial to focus on some of the benefits that 10G has to offer. They aren't in order of importance. Its just a general list that may help readers remember that there are some pretty cool features in Oracle 10G. Hopefully you will find it to be both informational and an interesting read.
Ease of Installation
I remember the good old days. When I began my career, the Oracle installers
were just screen painters that forced you to use the TAB key to navigate back
and forth between selections and screens.
Installations used to take hours and experiencing problem after problem was commonplace. Successfully installing Oracle became a rite of passage as a DBA. Four hours after you started the installation (and fighting through errors, warnings and placing a half dozen CDs in the reader), you would finish up and think to yourself "I am an installation GENIUS!". You next thought would be "I hope I don't have to go through this again for a while."
With each new release, the installer became easier to use, installation speeds increased and the number of installation problems decreased. In a few years, I'll be telling new DBAs "You don't know how good you have it. I remember when installations used to take three days... We were real DBAs back then. We even had to log in at NIGHT TIME and take the data OFFLINE to do work." Darn kids don't know how good they have it nowadays .
We do DOZENS of Oracle installations a month here at Remote DBA Experts. One of the benefits of working here is the sheer thrill of working on virtually every operating system that Oracle makes a product on. Name the O/S and hardware combination and we can truthfully say "been there and installed an Oracle product on it."
When our first set of 10G CDs arrived a couple of years ago, the DBA opened up the package and said "Hey, where's the rest of them? I think they forgot to send me all of the CDs I need to do the install." We checked MetaLink and found that Oracle10G only needs a couple of CDs. One main CD and another called "The Companion CD" which really should be called "The Companion CD that is required for all installs" since it pretty much has to be installed when you install Oracle.
The team here really likes the fact that the installer now performs pre-installation requirement checks before laying down the software. The installer itself now determines if the O/S environment is configured to correctly run the Oracle software. Having the installer verify that you have performed "your pre-installation" duties is very beneficial.
10G Data Pump
I'm a big fan of 10G Data Pump. Once you become accustomed to the new environment,
it's a pretty good utility. There is a learning curve - like the first time
you try to restart a Data Pump job by just rerunning the script again. You'll
quickly find out that Data Pump has a command for that. At least it provides
you with the "Master table exists" error message to point you to your
mistake.
Here's a quick list of some of the features I like:
- The utility
IS faster than Export and Import. Maybe not as much faster as Oracle says
it is - but it is faster. I have personally seen Exports and Imports run for
hours - and days.
- I like being
able to use parallelism to improve performance.
- You can stop
and restart jobs. How great is that? The master table knows where you left
off so you don't have to spend all of that time trying to code a new Import
statement that won't duplicate rows in tables that were successfully loaded.
This is really helpful.
- How many times
did you have to "pick a number, any number" when you had to determine
how much space you would need for your Export Dump file? Data Pump provides
an option that estimates the output dump file size that would be created by
a Data Pump Export.
- One of my favorite
features is the network transfer option that allows administrators to attach
to any source database that can be accessed from the network, transfer the
data and write it to the target database. No dumpfile required! Administrators
use the NETWORK_LINK parameter to specify a pre-created database link that
points to the source database.
- You can use
the Data Pump Flashback feature to go back in time and export data how it
looked in the past. This helps when you get a visit from one of your developers
stating "I think I might have updated 47 production tables by mistake,
but I won't know until I see the data." Use the flashback feature during
the Data Pump Export and use the Data Pump Import utility to pump the data
into a new schema for the developer to review.
- You can use the EXCLUDE parameter to exclude specific objects using custom syntax. For example, EXCLUDE=INDEX:"LIKE 'DEPT%'" would exclude indexes that start with the name "DEPT".
The more I thought about the Data Pump features I liked, the longer I thought this blog would be. So here are links to three blogs I wrote on Data Pump.
- Data
Pump Part 1 Features and Benefits - A general overview of the 10G Data
Pump Utility.
- Data
Pump Design and Architecture - We dig deeper into inner-workings of the
Data Pump utility.
- Data
Pump Export - We continue the Data Pump discussion by learning how to
use 10G Data Pump Export to "pump" data out of an Oracle database.
- Data Pump Import - The series finale on Data Pump Import.
10G Automatic
Alerting
Oracle10G provides early warning mechanisms to alert administrators of possible
error conditions. The database itself collects numerous metrics that were previously
collected by 9i's Oracle Enterprise Manager. Administrators are able to select
from dozens of server-generated alerts. Server
generated alerts are activated by a new background process called MMON. MMON
is able to access the SGA directly and perform the metrics calculations and
threshold monitoring.
10G Grid Control enhances these capabilities by providing administrators with a GUI interface to administer alerts and configure notification mechanisms. Administrators are able to use Grid Control or the standalone version, Database Control to set up e-mail and pager notifications. In addition, all server-generated alerts are displayed on the Database Control/Grid Control home pages.
As readers of this blog know, I'm a huge fan of 10G Grid Control. Although the database alerts can be set up in the database using the archaic command line interface, if I can do it using Grid Control with a few clicks of the mouse, that's the tool I will use. And to think I used to call 9i OEM "a Sissy GUI Tool".
Setting up 10G's "early warning system" places you in the proactive DBA category as opposed to reactive. The term we us to describe a pure reactive DBA is "firefighter". That's the DBA or DBA team that runs from one fire to the next. I will acknowledge that we are ALL firefighters from time to time. At one of my previous jobs, I spent six months working with another DBA trying to beat an absolutely atrocious third-party vendor package into submission.
You all know the type of third-party vendor package I'm talking about. Someone from your management food chain shows up in your cube and states "Hey, even though you rated this vendor an absolute 0 in all technical categories, and flatly stated that we should not consider them as a viable alternative, we chose them anyway. The Senior VP from the business unit liked the color of their screens. I'm sure you'll be able to get it working."
You then get on 72 conference calls with the vendor after the package crushes a 6 CPU box with 10 concurrent users. Most of the conversations are with the vendor's lead technical experts who are as arrogant as they are inexperienced. Their continued mantra is "you don't understand how Oracle works, it's your fault, you don't understand how Oracle works, it's your fault .". This mantra never stops even though you show them poor SQL coding, transaction looping problems, etc
But I digress... During my career as an Oracle instructor, one of the most common recommendations I used to provide to my Oracle students was the benefits of database monitoring. My catch phrase was "We monitor by day so we don't get called at night." By the end of the DBA I class, all I would have to say is "We monitor by day " and the class would respond accordingly. I would then award them with a set of scripts that allowed them to do database connect checks and track datafile free space.
10G Grid Control does all that (and more) for you automatically. The set of checks range the spectrum, from agent unable to connect to target (that means either the database, server or agent broke), to tablespace freespace and alert log errors. As I stated previously, 10G provides dozens of alert choices and is your one-stop-shop for proactive database monitoring. That's a good thing. I would rather wade through dozens of alerts I don't want to activate than spend ANY time coding an alert that wasn't provided by the toolset.
One of my previous blogs titled "Configuring 10G OEM Grid Control's Automatic Alert Notification System" will help you set up proactive performance monitoring in 10G. The title says it all. It provides everything you need to activate 10G Grid Control's early warning system.
Next Up
The 10 Thinks I like About 10G Continues. Could be more than 10 maybe...
Vendor