Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

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CHAPTER 15 THE BIG PICTURE AND THE TEN DELIVERABLES
at least one year if you can afford the space. Baseline snapshots should be retained
indefinitely. For example, you can designate the period between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.
every Monday morning as a baseline period so that the snapshots marking the
beginning and end of the period are retained indefinitely.
9. Exception reports: This deliverable includes reports on SLA violations, security violations,
backup failures, and the like. For example, a certain stored procedure or
SQL statement may have been identified as critical to the business, and an exception
report can be produced by mining STATSPACK data.
10. Audit reports: This deliverable typically refers to audit reports conducted by
security auditors but can also refer to internal audits of compliance with organizational
processes such as Change Management or database reviews by external
consultants. The absence of audits indicates a lack of oversight of the database
management function.
The Book You Really Need and the Art of the SOP
The book you really need will never be found in bookstores—it is the book containing all
the procedures that you need to operate your databases. You’re going to have to write
that book yourself. Nobody can write the book for you, because you have a unique environment
and nobody except you would write a book that caters to a unique environment.
Do you know how to start or stop a database? I thought I did—until I went to work
in a large Network Operations Center. We had Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, Linux, and Windows.
We had Oracle 8i, Oracle 9i, and Oracle 10g. We had VCS, HP Service Guard, Sun Clusters,
Data Guard, and RAC. There were so many variations of the startup and shutdown procedures
that I could not remember all of them.
A common task such as adding a data file to a database requires different methods
depending on whether you are using cooked files, raw devices, or ASM. Additional complexities
are introduced by RAC and Data Guard. Raw files in particular are notoriously
difficult to manage—they make it easy to damage the database. And, in my experience,
database administrators routinely forget the important step of backing up the data file
immediately after it is created.
A TRUE STORY
A database administrator stopped a database using the command in preparation for moving
some data files to a new location. Unknown to him, the database was managed by Veritas high availability
software, which automatically restarted the database. The database was corrupted when the DBA
moved the files.
It happened to me—it could happen to you.