Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

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CHAPTER 11 FIXING PROBLEMS
The Book We All Want and Best Practices for
Problem Management
The book we all want is a book that has a clear description of every Oracle problem and
step-by- step instructions for fixing them. That book will never be written. There are just
too many problems that can occur. Problems can have multiple solutions. The solution
may depend on your particular circumstances. In many cases, it is not even clear what the
problem really is. The best you can do is to use best practices for problem management.
Here are my suggestions:
: Monitoring your database and preventing problems is
better than fixing problems—for example, add space to a database before it fills
up completely and jobs begin to fail.
: After the problem has been fixed, look for the
underlying root cause—for example, find out why the database is growing and
how much space will be needed over the medium term.
: A worker is only as good as his tools. The more tools you have, the
better you will be equipped to solve a problem. Commonly used tools include
Oracle- supplied tools such as Enterprise Manager and SQL Developer and thirdparty
tools such as Toad from Quest Software and DBArtisan from Embarcadero
Technologies.
: The two obvious advantages of
standard operating procedures are consistency and efficiency, but there are
many others. We will return to the subject of standard operating procedures in
Chapter 15.
: Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA), introduced
in Chapter 9, is a simple tool that you can use to document your environment. An
RDA collection collects all the information about the database and operating system
into one compact package that is very useful in solving problems.
: There are several online forums that can help you solve a problem.
If you have an Oracle support contract, you can escalate a problem to an Oracle
engineer. We will return to this subject later in this chapter.
: The most important thing to do is to keep work records. When
a problem reoccurs, it helps to have access to the details of prior occurrences.
Every environment is prone to certain problems—for example, Oracle Database
10.1.0.3 is affected by a bug that causes the nightly statistics gathering job
to fail—the characteristic error code is ORA- 00904.