The James Bond of Database Administration

“Defending our systems needs to be as sexy as attacking others. There’s really only one solution: Bond.”

That is what ‘The Guardian’ wrote recently in an article entitled “The Man with the Golden Mouse: why data security needs a James Bond“.

Attending the annual Oracle ACE Director Briefing at Oracle HQ awoke up an interesting debate on the following question: What will happen in the near future with the DBA profession? Who is now the James Bond of Database Administration?

According to TechTarget, big data tools are changing data architectures in many companies. The effect on the skill sets required by database administrators may be moderate, but some new IT tricks are likely to be needed. GoldenGate is the new Streams, Exadata is the new RAC, Sharding the new Partitioning, Big Data is the new data (Texas is an exception), you name it…

Having the privilege to work throughout the years with some of the best database experts in the world has, for all it matters, proved to me that Double-O-Sevens are in fact more like Double-O-six-hundreds. Meaning that there are 100s of DBAs that qualify with no hesitation whatsoever as the James Bonds of Database Administration. I have learned so much from my ex Nokia colleagues, from my current Enkitec and Accenture colleagues. Not to mention friends from companies like eDBA, Pythian, Miracle, etc.

A DBA needs to have so many skills. Look for instance at Craig S. Mullins’ suggested 17 skills required of a DBA. Kyle Hunter’s article The evolution of the DBA and the Data Architect is clearly pointing to the emerging skillsets in the Data Revolution.

In the IT business, and in database administration in particular, it is not that important how well you know the old stuff, it is more important how fast you can learn the new things. Here are some of the tools that help every modern Oracle DBA:

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c
ORAchk
Metalink/MOS
Developer Tools
Oracle Application Express (APEX)
SQL Developer
Oracle JDeveloper
SQL Developer Data Modeler
And last but not least SQL*Plus®

These additional Metalink tools might be often of great help:

Diagnostic Tools Catalog – Note ID 559339.1
OS Watcher (Support Tool) – Note 301137.1
LTOM (Support Tool) – Note 352363.1
HANGFG (Support Tool) – Note 362094.1
SQLT (Support Tool) – Note 215187.1
PLSQL Profiler (Support Script) – Note 243755.1
MSRDT for the Oracle Lite Repository – Note 458350.1
Trace Analyzer TRCANLZR – Note 224270.1
ORA-600/ORA-7445 Error Look-up Tool – Note 153788.1
Statspack (causing more problems than help in 12c)

The Man with the Golden Mouse is the James Bond of Database Administration. The best DBA tools are still knowledge and experience.

Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 New Features

Eventually, 11.2.0.4 is out although I always had the feeling that it will come before 12c. Patch number is 13390677. More than 5000 bugs have been fixed!

End date for 11.2.0.2 is 31st of October 2013, which means that it is time to move to either 11.2.0.3 or 11.2.0.4. Or why not to 12.1.0.1? Check the roadmap!

The release notes can be found here. As it will be the terminal patchset of 11gR2, the features introduced are the last we will see in 11g.

Check into detail the New Features of 11.2.0.4 but most of all it is as follows:

1. Oracle Data Redaction is now part of 11gR2
2. The Trace File Analyzer (TFA) and Collector
3. RACcheck is now included
4. The OPTIMIZER_DYNAMIC_SAMPLING initialization parameter is set to the new value of 11
5. Total Recall: there is a new OPTIMIZE DATA clause when creating or altering a flashback data archive
6. The DES, RC4, and MD5 algorithms are desupported
7. New sqlnet.ora parameter SSL_EXTENDED_KEY_USAGE
8. New init.ora parameter: when set to true ENABLE_GOLDENGATE_REPLICATION RDBMS services used by Oracle GoldenGateare enabled.

If you would like to check the bugs fixed in 11.2.0.4 check MOS 11.2.0.4 Patch Set – List of Bug Fixes by Problem Type (Doc ID 1562142.1)!

Note: 11.2.0.4 is not yet available for Exadata.

And finally, here is all the information about my presentations at Oracle OpenWorld 2013, welcome!

Session ID: CON2131
Session Title: DBA Best Practices for Performance Tuning in a Pluggable World
Venue / Room: Moscone South – 308
Date and Time: 9/23/13, 12:15 – 13:15

Session ID: CON1759
Session Title: The Least-Known Features of Oracle Database, Part 2
Venue / Room: Moscone South – 200
Date and Time: 9/24/13, 12:00 – 13:00

Session ID: CON1715
Session Title: The Important Things DBAs Should Do Before and After an Oracle Database Upgrade
Venue / Room: Moscone South – 236
Date and Time: 9/25/13, 17:00 – 18:00

Session ID: CON9863
Session Title: Managing Oracle Engineered Systems
Marriott Marquis – Foothill F
Date and Time: 9/26/13, 15:30 – 16:30

GoldenGate enters the Oracle database

A friend of mine claims that GoldenGate is a product that is supposed to be used and exist outside the Oracle database. And if you run Oracle on a version below 11.2.0.2, the following query for GOLDENGATE objects will probably return no rows selected. But here is what happens with Oracle 11.2.0.2:

Interesting, right ?

Note that recently Oracle GoldenGate 11.1.1.1 was released. For Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle versions 10gR2 and higher, Extract now manages log retention by default. With this new feature, the documentation says you should be aware of the following:

1. The upgrade will automatically register each of your Extract processes with the database, which will start retaining the logs based on the current recovery requirements for each process.

2. An Oracle Streams Capture process will be created for each Extract process and will have the same name as that process. These Capture processes are non-functional and can operate concurrently with other local Oracle Streams installations.

3. In order for the upgrade to succeed (on 11.2.0.2), you will need to assign the Extract user some additional privileges.

Note first that you need to commit after executing the procedure in the dbms_goldengate_auth package:

SQL> exec dbms_goldengate_auth.grant_admin_privilege('GGATE');
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> commit work;
Commit complete.

Note additionally that the privilege_type can be CAPTURE, APPLY or BOTH. Both (= *) is the default. If you prefer that the GGATE user is granted also the select_catalog_role, you should run the command like this:

SQL> exec dbms_goldengate_auth.grant_admin_privilege('GGATE','*',TRUE);
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> commit work;
Commit complete.

Oracle GoldenGate version 11.1.1.1 contains improved sequence support. To enable this support, you must install some database procedures that support the new FLUSH SEQUENCE command. I recommend that for details you read Samuel Oleleh’s Oracle Goldengate 11.1.1.1 Sequence Support article.

The (Oracle database related) new features of GoldenGate 11.1.1.1 are very well described in the following blob entries:

1. Oracle GoldenGate version 11.1.1.1 new features by Samuel Oleleh.
2. Oracle GoldenGate version 11.1.1.1 released by Miladin Modrakovic.

For all the MySQL users (are there any?), I will note that there is a new ALTLOGDEST option that was added to TRANLOGOPTIONS to specify the location of the MySQL log index file. This value overrides the database default location. Extract reads the log index file to find the binary log file that it needs to read.

For the Sybase users I will mention that the range of values for DBOPTIONS TDSPACKETSIZE has been changed. Additionally, two formerly internal parameters are now available for use in a TRANLOGOPTIONS statement:
– TRANLOGOPTIONS MAXREADSIZE specifies how many records Extract reads from the transaction log at one time. It can be used to improve performance.
– TRANLOGOPTIONS READQUEUESIZE specifies the internal queue size, in bytes, for transaction data. It can be increased to improve performance.

For Oracle GoldenGate installations please check:

1. Pythian’s Oracle GoldenGate Installation, Part 1
2. Pythian’s Oracle GoldenGate Installation, Part 2

As I hinted above MySQL and GoldenGate do not in my opinion go hand in hand. But I would briefly like to mention that Oracle GoldenGate can be used together with Active Data Guard to achieve almost zero planned and/or non-planned down time:

I will soon write more on live upgrades, zero downtime and 100% SLAs 🙂

P.S. As of today, Google returns only two pages with results for dba_goldengate_privileges, try for yourself to see if things have already changed: