Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Database Management

Early this year, Oracle announced the Announcing the general availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Database Management.

With Database Management Cloud Service, DBAs get a unified console for on-premises and cloud databases with lifecycle database management capabilities for monitoring, performance management, tuning and administration.

As of today, Database Management is available to use with external Oracle databases deployed on-premises. Support for Oracle Databases on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be coming soon.

The Database Management pricing is quite simple and clear, here it is:

This is a deep dive into the new OCI Database Management Service, and here are the basics:

1. From the main menu go down and search for Database Management:

2. On the right side, go to “Oracle Databases” in order to enable Database Management (opens a new tab):

3. Start registering external pluggable databases – as of today we cannot register cloud databases:

4. Select the compartment and choose a database display name:

5. Select the database and click on register.

The Database Management service comes with 4 main features:

• Fleet monitoring and management
• Database groups
• Database summary
• Custom PL/SQL jobs

Before you enable and use Database Management, you must review and complete some prerequisite tasks:

• Install Management Agents for Database Management
• Register the Oracle Database with the External Database service
• Connect the Oracle Database to the External Database handle
• Create Oracle Cloud Infrastructure IAM user groups

After you complete these prerequisite tasks, you must create policies to assign permissions to user groups in order to enable and use Database Management. 

In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, policies provide the permissions required to allow users to work in certain ways with specific types of resources in a tenancy or a particular compartment.

A policy is written to determine who can perform what functions on which resources using the following basic syntax:

Allow <subject> to <verb> <resource> in <location>

In this policy example, you can create to grant the DB-AEG user group the permission to enable Database Management for all External Databases my your tenancy JULIANDON:

Allow group DB-AEG to use external-database-family in JULIANDON

The external-database-family is the family resource-type for the External Database service, which includes the following individual resource-types:

• external-container-databases
• external-pluggable-databases
• external-non-container-databases
• external-database-connectors

For more details, check the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation.

Enhanced Diagnosability of Oracle Database: What is an Attention Log?

A correct diagnosis is three-fourths the remedy – Mahatma Gandhi

How true this statement is also in the database world! Often it is more difficult to diagnose an issue than fixing it. Going in the past through the alert.log file to find information that needs attention has been simplified by creating a single attention.log file.

In the latest Oracle release, diagnosability of database issues is enhanced through a new attention log, as well as classification of information written to database trace files. The new attention log is written in a structured format (XML or JSON) that is much easier to process or interpret and only contains information that requires attention from an administrator.

The attention log is an externally modifiable file that contains information about critical and highly visible database events. We can use the attention log to quickly access information about critical events that need action.

So, where is the location of the new log file introduced by Oracle Database 21c? Notice that V$DIAG_INFO has a new entry called Attention log:

The attention log contains a pre-determined, translatable series of messages, with one message for each event. There is one attention log for each database instance. There are two ways to view the contents of the attention log.

1. Open the attention.log file that can be found under $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/database_name/instance_id/log directory. Note that the documentation does not reflect the correct location of the attention.log file.

2. Query the V$DIAG_ALERT_EXT view using the required filters:

The filtering is done through message_level. A message_level of 1 corresponds to critical errors that need immediate action.

You can filter V$DIAG_ALERT_EXT on either MESSAGE_TYPE or MESSAGE_LEVEL. As you can see in the example above, I am filtering for only critical errors. Here is what the types and levels mean by number:

MESSAGE_TYPE:

1: UNKNOWN – essentially the NULL type
2: INCIDENT_ERROR – error for some internal or unexpected reason: must be reported to Oracle Support
3: ERROR – an error of some kind has occurred – not really meaningful
4: WARNING: an action occurred or a condition was discovered that should be reviewed and may require action
5: NOTIFICATION: reports a normal action or event: for example “logon completed”
6: TRACE: output of a diagnostic trace

MESSAGE_LEVEL:

1: CRITICAL: critical errors
2: SEVERE: severe errors
8: IMPORTANT: important message
16: NORMAL: normal message

The attention log has the following attributes, not all documented yet:

– Attention ID: a unique identifier for the message
– Attention type: Error, Warning, Notification or Additional information
– Message text
– Notification
– Error
– Urgency: Immediate, Soon, Deferrable or Information
– Scope: Session, Process, PDB Instance, CDB Instance, CDB Cluster, PDB or CDB
– Info
– Cause
– Action
– Class: Clusterware Admin, CDB admin or PDB admin
– Time

Note that an attention log entry seldom contains all attributes.