“Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.” Steven Spielberg
The DBA profession was recently rated as #6 among the Best Technology Jobs. Good for all of us who are in this line of business. But notice the stress level: Above Average!
DBAs are often busy people. Is that good or bad? Is “busy the new stupid”?
Automation is not a luxury for the DBAs but it is a way in which DBAs execute their job. Of course, there is one thing that cannot be automated and that is quality but the best DBAs automate almost everything.
Automating the database is a Win-Win for DBAs and DevOps. The mindset of the Enterprise DBA should be focused on harnessing the power of automation.
The following data shows what tasks are mostly and least automated:
Look at the last row above. I still wonder why Automatic SQL Tuning is so underestimated. It was so powerfully helping the DBA team of Nokia…
Oracle Database 12cR2 is out. And 12.2 comes with yet another new set of database automation related features:
– Oracle Data Guard now supports multiple failover targets in a fast-start failover configuration. Previous functionality allowed for only a single fast-start failover target. Multiple failover targets increase high availability by making an automatic failover more likely to occur if there is a primary outage.
– Oracle automatically synchronizes password files in Data Guard configurations: when the passwords of SYS, SYSDG, and so on, are changed, the password file at the primary database is updated and then the changes are propagated to all standby databases in the configuration.
– Online table move: nonpartitioned tables can be moved as an online operation without blocking any concurrent DML operations. A table move operation now also supports automatic index maintenance as part of the move.
– Automatic deployment of Oracle Data Guard: deployment is automatic for Oracle Data Guard physical replication between shards with Oracle Data Guard fast-start failover (automatic database failover): automatic database failover provides high availability for server, database, network, and site outages.
– Automatically set user tablespaces to read-only during upgrade: the new -T option for the parallel upgrade utility (catctl.pl) can be used to automatically set user tablespaces to read-only during an upgrade, and then back to read/write after the upgrade.
– The Oracle Trace File Analyzer (TFA) collector provides the option to automatically collect diagnostic information when TFA detects an incident.
– Oracle Data Guard support for Oracle Diagnostics Pack: this enables you to capture the performance data to the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) for an Active Data Guard standby database and to run Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) analysis on the AWR data.
– Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) support for pluggable databases: the AWR can be used in a PDB. This enables the capture and storage of performance data in the SYSAUX tablespace of the PDB.
– The new ENABLE_AUTOMATIC_MAINTENANCE_PDB initialization parameter can be used to enable or disable the running of automated maintenance tasks for all the pluggable databases (PDBs) in a multitenant container database (CDB) or for individual PDBs in a CDB.
– Automatic Data Optimization Support for In-Memory Column Store: Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) enables the automation of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) tasks. The automated capability of ADO depends on the Heat Map feature that tracks access at the row level (aggregated to block-level statistics) and at the segment level.
– Automatic Provisioning of Kerberos Keytab for Oracle Databases: the new okcreate utility automates the registering of an Oracle database as a Kerberos service principal, creating a keytab for it, and securely copying the keytab to the database for use in Kerberos authentication.
– Role-Based Conditional Auditing: auditing for new users with the DBA role would begin automatically when they are granted the role.
– Automatic Locking of Inactive User Accounts: within a user profile, the new INACTIVE_ACCOUNT_TIME parameter controls the maximum time that an account can remain unused. The account is automatically locked if a log in does not occur in the specified number of days.
Julian Dontcheff's Database Blog 