Just a blog post on the great conference coming up at the end of the month from ODTUG, KSCOPE 2014. The conference will be held in Seattle, Washington this year, (yeah, look forward to cooler temperatures than last year in New Orleans KSCOPE 2013… :)) I’ll be heading up the Database Track and the Women in Technology, (WIT) luncheon this year again for the conference and I recommend you don’t miss out! The Hands on Training for the Database Track is shaping up nicely thanks to some very hard work from Yury Velikanov, Michelle Malcher, Leighton Nelson, John Piwowar, Tim…
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Why is the Security Console an important new feature? I was contacted by three people just this last week on how to secure an EM12c environment. How many of you are still logging in to the EM12c console or CLI with the SYSMAN account? Bad DBA, BAD!! 🙂 Security Console The Security Console helps the administrator set clear expectations for security standards for database administration and EM12c environment security. It provides read only dashboards that clearly show security violations and status, along with steps to secure the EM12c environment. You can access the Security Console for EM12c via the Setup…
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How many of you use Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, recognize it can do so much more than just taking it out of the box and plugging it in, then proceed to start building metric extensions, plug-ins, writing EM CLI scripts, etc? How cool would it be if you could peruse a library of plug-ins to support the extensibility framework for you to check out and use for the benefit of your company and you? If you aren’t familiar with the Extensibility Exchange, it is exactly that! Oracle’s Extensibility Exchange is a library of contributions from Oracle, it’s trusted partners and…
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So, there is a lot to cover on this topic and I hope Part I got you ready for more! Part II, I’m going to cover the following areas of the AWR Warehouse: Installation Access ETL Load Process Installation Let’s start with Prerequisites: The AWR Warehouse Repository must be version 11.2.0.4 or higher. The Targets and I think this will get a few folks, need to be 12.1.0.2 or higher, (now folks know why some docs aren’t available yet!:)) Just as with installing ASH Analytics, etc., make sure your preferred credentials are set up for the database you plan to…
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I know a number of us performance tuning DBAs who’ve long wanted to retain AWR data, at least high-level AWR data for an extended period outside of the AWR repository on the local database. I implemented my own solution back in 2009-2010 at a previous employer as I was tired of hearing, “nothing’s changed”. Nothing like having the high-level AWR data on CPU, IO, network, application and concurrency waits to rebuke this type of assumption at budget decision time…. 🙂 The AWR data is collected as snapshots from ASH, AWR and ADDM in the target databases and then loaded to…
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If you have the Diagnostics/Tuning Management Packs and EM12c, you should be installing ASH Analytics to get the full benefit of optimization data that is available via the AWR and ASH. ASH Analytics is the future of the Top Activity view and I’ve written a number of posts on the value of the ASH Analytics product. With EM12c Release 4, there are a few, small improvements in the ASH Analytics installation. Where before, there were some challenges to verification of installation success, checking the status of a scheduled installation job, now it’s much easier. If the ASH Analytics package hasn’t…
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I talk a lot about Enterprise Manager 12c, from the OMS all the way to the EM CLI and the Agent, but I was discussing some interesting history with the account used by the OEM Management Agent- the DBSNMP account. The origination of the DBSNMP account was to support Oracle SNMP, (Simple Network Management Protocol.) Back in Oracle 7-8i days, this account was vulnerable to all kinds of nasty issues and there were steps that administrators needed to take to secure it- from making the snmp_rw.ora file inaccessible except to the ORACLE OS user, (residing in the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory) to…
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I’m still asked this question, as I’ve worked for some really fantastic companies in the past and the idea that I “gave up” my Oracle ACE Director and my voting board position at RMOUG seems a high price to pay when I could have gone anywhere. I do appreciate it, as many just want what’s best for me, so I do take this into consideration. I decided a while back that with all Enterprise Manager Cloud Control encompassed, that it was what I really wanted to specialize in. I spent time reading everything I could get my hands on, talked…
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Most of you know I don’t like pink, but I also am not a fan of yellow. Yellow houses Yellow flowers Yellow in my EM12c summary page You know what yellow I’m talking about: Now I’m just as disturbed by the red section of that graph, but today, we’re going to focus on the unknown, the yellow. If something is down, then you know it isn’t uploading data and is most definitely a critical issue, but what about the unknown? Why is Enterprise Manager reporting something is unknown? To first tackle this type of summary, we need to know the…
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I’m often asked what management pack is used by what feature and there is actually a very easy way to find out this information in the EM12c console. Let’s say we are in ASH Analytics and want to view what management packs are required as part of this feature utilization: Click on the global Setup menu in the upper right, then click on Management Packs and Packs for this Page– You will quickly see a pop up page that shows you what management pack(s) are required to use the ASH Analytics feature: If we jumped to SQL Monitor and did…
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So back at the end of the EM CAB, I’d received an email stating I had an over-sized database and too many hits to continue on Go Daddy as the host for my website. I called into tech support to understand what options I had, but was never told that I had any option but leaving Go Daddy as my hosting service. I was told I had two weeks per the email, but asked for three and was told on the phone that wasn’t a problem. I then did some research and decided that Blue Host had done well supporting…
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We are back to REPVFY, (Repository Verification Utility) this week, (first post can be found here…) And I’m onto the next file of substance since looking at the advisor log, (performance data). The next files are the two “details” files. One is a query used to produce the output and the second is the actual output from it. These two files are clearly named and can be found with the following naming convention: details_<timestamp>.sql details_<timestamp>.log If you are curious about what the details_<timestamp>.sql is doing as it produces the output, well you’re in luck, as I’m going to go step…
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When working with Top Activity, we’re accustomed to viewing to wait class in the top, graphed area and below left, the top SQL by SQL_ID and below right is our Top Session information. ASH Analytics was designed so you would enter into a view that looked very similar to Top Activity, but was enhanced so the user could update it to view the data in multiple ways. In Enterprise Manager’s traditional view of Top Activity, it is easy to recognize the similarities with ASH Analytics but that’s where much of it stops. The user has the ability to change not just the…
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The last couple weeks I’ve been lucky enough to get time with a new ZFSSA Simulator, (it will be out soon for everyone, so you’ll have to just play with the current one available, patience grasshopper! :)) and spent checking out the newest features available with Database as a Service, (DBaaS) Snapclone via Enteprise Manager 12c. I’m really thrilled with Snapclone- In two previous positions, I spent considerable time finding new ways of speeding up RMAN duplicates to ease the stress of weekly datamart builds that were sourced off of production and this feature would have been a lifesaver back…
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This is the first of many posts I’ll do where we take a particular issue and trouble-shoot. I’ll go through multiple scenarios to show the common steps to take via the Enterprise Manager 12c from discovery to identification to research to explanation. This blog will use the following features: ASH Analytics SQL Details ASH Report The first thing we need is an issue- Note the CPU red line- the IO is considerably over that and quite a lot of IO, along with Commit and Concurrency waits. We’ll start with this as our issue that we can see, has quickly escalated…
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There are a number of Verification Utilities for Enterprise Manager 12c, (EM12c) and I’ve written about them before, but today I’m going to start on the Repository Verification Utility, (REPVFY). This will be an ongoing series, as there are so many valuable features rolled into the utility and new ones that will be added as new patches and releases happen. For this post, I’m going to be reviewing a level 2 diagnostics report from a new repository database. This is going to offer us all kinds of valuable data about the environment and should be considered by any EM12c administrator…
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Now that we learned in Part I how to create a notification schedule for a specified user so that it will only page one individual on an oncall rotation, I’ll now show you how to use this in conjunction with rulesets to complete the process of modernizing and automating your oncall. In my Test scenario, I’ve already made copies of the main rule sets, have deviated rules by three rules and four groups, (mission critical, production, test and development.) Mission critical are all systems that I WANT to be paged for after hours and need to know immediately if there…
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I came across a discussion on Oracle-l on how after hours paging was handled for many companies and was kind of surprised how many DBAs still carry around a secondary pager/cell phone or are just expected to be woke up if on call or not. I’m not one to go back to sleep once I’m woke, so I’ve been a proponent of EM notification schedules for after hours paging. Now there are other ways to handle this in Enterprise Manager 12c as well, but we’ll use this method, as it is backward compatible to OEM 10g, too. The requirement of…