Month: June 2008

It seems to me that ITIL best practices and consolidation conflict in goals. ITIL focuses on isolation of faults and features to make it easier to manage services. Consolidation aggregates services to reduce the need to manage. I have been working with customers on converting large iron database to commodity rac clusters. It seems like the biggest benefit is not consolidation but making everything the same. The same OS version. The same database release. The same stored procedures. The same app features. Splitting services tends to cause drift when it comes to patches, tuning, and customizations.

A year and a half ago I took the 10g Administration I class from Oracle Education. As part of my quarterly education class I signed up for the 11g Administration I class. I was hoping to learn new stuff about 11g and sharpen the saw as my manager puts it. Unfortunately, the material has not substantially changed between versions of the class.

The main differences are in chapters 13, and 18. In the 11g class, Chapter 13 –  Performance Management has been updated to include more about automatic memory management and less talk about SQL Tuning. The chapter on Flashback has been moved into the Administration II class and is not covered in this class. In Chapter 18 – Enhancing Database Capabilities, new features on alerting and incident reporting are detailed. This is all part of the Enterprise Manager Console that comes with 11g. The chapter goes on to detail the use of Metalink, logging service requests, and managing patches. This is important information that is relevant to any database rollout into production.

Unfortunately, I would not recommend attending this class if you have already attended the 10g Administration I class. 90% of the material is the same and the 10% that is different is covered in the Enterprise Manager class. If you have not taken the 10g Administration I class I strongly advise that you take the 11g class even if you are rolling out 10g into production. There really are not any substantial differences in the class. In talking with the instructor, it appears that all of the significant changes have been pushed into the Administration II class which details new features of the 11g database.

installing the database is relatively simple. The lab corresponding to this chapter is relatively simple. The installer helps you walk through the installation and does a relatively good job of catching problems or issues. When I installed the product using the lab configuration, nothing went wrong. I selected the basic install and did not configure a sample database. When I installed it in a VMWare instance, I had more problems. I did need to configure a few kernel parameters, swap space, accounts, groups, and rpm packages. A good tutorial on preparing the Linux operating system can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/11gr1_db/install/oel5gainst/oel5gainst.htm. This give you a good screen by screen configuration on getting the operating system ready for the database. A good tutorial on installing the database can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/11gr1_db/install/dbinst/dbinst.htm which shows how to install Enterprise Edition. This is a Linux specific installation and shows screen by screen on how to install the database.

Some of the commands that I needed to know in Linux to get this working were:

• swapon, dd, and mkswap – I needed to add swap space because I did not prepare it properly
• rpm -ivh – I did not install the libaio-devel package properly. I had to go back and install it.
• ifconfig – I needed to change the network from dhcp to static ip address. This was caught during the installation.
• vi /etc/sudoers – I wanted to add oracle to the sudoers list so I could record what was executed for the install
• mount and umount – so that I could mount and unmount the Linux media and database media

Overall, this was relatively simple to make work. The most difficult issues were getting the operating system ready for the installation. Fortunately, the installer guided me to what was needed and I could search the internet on how to do things like adding swap or assigning static IP addresses.

The actual installation process consists of three steps in the class

1. oraInstall – install the software without a sample database
2. netca – configure a default listener
3. dbca – configure a generic database with unicode character support and a custom SGA and PGA size. The size recommended in the lab was SGA:404 and PGA:150. Other than this everything else is defaults.

This is a good introduction to the topics and concepts of database architecture. This is a good place to get started on managing a database. The alternative is to read http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/toc.htm which is a good document that supplements the introduction chapter.

The differences from 10g to 11g are not that significant at this layer. Some of the memory structures have changed and some of the ways that you administer parameters change. The basic concepts and architecture has not substantially changed so if you are familiar with 10g, there should be little or no change. There is, however, substantial differences between 9i and 10g/11g. This is worth the time if you are running 9i or are familiar with 9i and not 10g.

This is a good introduction to the topics and concepts of database architecture. This is a good place to get started on managing a database. The alternative is to read http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/toc.htm which is a good document that supplements the introduction chapter.

The differences from 10g to 11g are not that significant at this layer. Some of the memory structures have changed and some of the ways that you administer parameters change. The basic concepts and architecture has not substantially changed so if you are familiar with 10g, there should be little or no change. There is, however, substantial differences between 9i and 10g/11g. This is worth the time if you are running 9i or are familiar with 9i and not 10g.

This week I am in an Oracle Education class. I will log/journal the class while I am taking it. The class is Database 11g: Administration Workshop I.

The course is broken into the following segments

• introduction
• exploring the database architecture
• preparing the database env
• creating an oracle db
• managing the oracle instance
• configuring the oracle network env
• managing database storage structures
• admin user security
• managing schema objects
• managing data and concurrency
• managing undo data
• implementing oracle database security
• database maintenance
• performance management
• backup and recovery concepts
• performing database backups
• performing database recovery
• moving data
• enhancing database capabilities