Readers of this blog know that I rarely stray off topic. The intent of this blog to provide technical information to readers that is hopefully both informative and interesting.

That being said, I thought I would write one blog on my personal career path. A career path that will be different by the time my next blog is released. Rest assured that I intend to get back on topic as soon as ppssible.

I was going to show you how to schedule statistics gathering jobs manually in 10G Grid Control, but I just used a neat feature that I'd like to show you. 10G Grid Control R2 provides a Hang Analysis tool that helps administrators easily identify contention problems.

We recently used the Hang Analysis feature to quickly identify an application transaction that was blocking other transactions from successfully executing. I thought it might be beneficial for us to deviate from our intended topic of discussion to review 10G R2 Grid Control's Hang Analysis tool. This is one feature that I think you'll find to be VERY worthwhile!

Now that we understand how to set up maintenance windows, let’s take a look at 10G Grid Control’s (Enterprise Manager), default statistics gathering options. It is important that we understand what the options are and how to configure them. Only then can we determine if the automatic and manually executed statistics gathering jobs are configured to meet the needs of our individual database applications.

Now that we have a general understanding of the important role that statistics play in query optimization, let's forge ahead with our discussion on statistics administration best practices. In this blog, we'll learn how to configure 10G EM R2's maintenance windows to tailor them to meet our application's business processing requirements. In the next blog, we'll examine the optimizer statistics gathering default options page and discuss what some of the recommended settings should be.

In the last blog of this series, we’ll complete our discussion on 10G EM R2 optimizer statistics administration by learning how to schedule optimizer statistics gathering jobs manually.

10G Enterprise Manager provides an optimizer statistics administration panel that allows administrators to gather, restore, delete, lock and unlock object statistics. Before we learn how to use 10G EM R2’s object statistics administrations panels, let's take a quick look at object statistics and find out why they are so important to effective query optimization.

Part 1 of this three part series will provide a high-level overview of optimizer statistics. Part 2 will focus on maintenance windows that control when automatic statistics gathering jobs run. In part 3, we’ll learn how to use 10G EM R2 to ensure that the optimizer has the correct statistical information it needs to generate optimal access paths.

We are moving forward with our ASM evaluation. We recently held a facilitated brainstorming session that was led by Giant Eagle’s ace data administrator Jim McQuade. Jim has extensive training and experience in meeting management and did an excellent job leading the meeting. I thought I would spend a few minutes on effective meeting management and show you the rough draft of our high-level ASM test plan.

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 EM 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.