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 EM 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 EM 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 EM 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.

This blog should be a quick and easy read. I will admit that this is a weird combination of topics. We are going to learn how to generate traditional, Statspack-style performance reports from the Automatic Workload Repository. This blog also contains my thoughts on the future of database tuning. And the future does NOT include administrators poring over reams of database statistics to tune Oracle databases.

I absolutely and firmly believe that ADDM and the intelligent advisors are the future of database performance analysis. In my next blog, we let Oracle do all of the tuning work for us when we generate an ADDM task from the same set of beginning and ending snapshot IDs.

It looks like I am going to have to deviate from my intended topic of discussion for one blog. Oracle has recently announced 10G Express Edition with great fanfare. I thought that I would provide you with a quick overview of the product. We’ll then get back on track next week when I discuss 10G EM performance snapshot reports.

Now that we have a good overview of 10G AWR snapshots, let’s continue our discussion by learning how to tailor the 10G AWR snapshot environment to meet our specific needs.

If you are like me, I’m sure you would rather learn how to use the performance statistics captured in the snapshots to monitor and tune your databases. But we must spend one blog learning how to configure 10G EM to ensure that we have the information we need. We can’t tune if we don’t have adequate performance measurements!

Now that we have completed our discussion on the 10G EM Advisors, let’s take an in-depth look at the performance statistics capturing and reporting capabilities provided by 10G EM. Oracle 10G captures performance statistics on a periodic basis and stores the data in the Automatic Workload Repository. The individual statistic capture executions are called AWR Snapshots.

We’ll begin our discussion with a review of the 10G AWR snapshot environment. In a series of upcoming blogs will learn how to use AWR Snapshots to generate performance reports, compare two sets of performance statistics to one another, compare a captured set of statistics to a baseline and finally, how to preserve snapshot sets for future diagnostic use. When we are done with this series, you’ll be saying “Statspack, who needs THAT tired old tool anymore?"

We continue our discussion on the 10G EM advisors. In this blog, I’ll provide you with a brief review of Automatic Undo Management in Oracle 10G. I’ll continue the discussion by showing you how to use the 10G EM Automatic Undo Advisor to determine how much space you will need in your undo tablespace for a specified undo retention time period.