Final 2009 seminar on Oracle Performance Options, Products and Enterprise Manager Packs

This Friday, I conducted another interesting seminar which was S&I System's last Oracle seminar for the year. The topic was Oracle Performance Options, Products and Enterprise Manager Packs.

These were the topics I covered. The clients were introduced to many new Oracle concepts for the first time.

• Partitioning Option, and improvements in 11gR2
• Parallel Query Option, and improvements in 11gR2
• Advanced Compression Option (11g), and Hybrid Columnar Compression in 11gR2
• Active Data Guard (11g)
• In-memory Database Cache (Times-Ten), and it's Grid in 11gR2
• Enterprise Manager Diagnostics and Tuning Packs
  

The following Enterprise Manager packs were also demonstrated in live demos:

• Service Level Management Pack
• Configuration Management Pack
• Diagnostics and Tuning Packs
• Remedy Connector
  

I also demo'ed the new Enterprise Manager feature of SQL Monitoring of long-running SQL in 11g databases, which suitably impressed the attendees.

A number of clients immediately expressed interest in using the Service Level Management and Configuration Management packs for their hundreds of database targets, and discussed Grid Control architecture for such large systems.

The 2009 list of successful Oracle seminars conducted by S&I Systems can be seen on:

http://www.si-asia.com/marketing/oracleworkshops2009/

Security and Grid Control

A Senior Infrastructure Architect wrote:

"I am coming across distinct resistance towards using OEM Grid from those concerned with security around listener ports and data content - on a colocated management infrastructure (same data centre as the given databases)."

My reponse to this was:

"Any large corporate's security team does have quesions about Grid Control, but this is mainly due to lack of information. Grid Control is fully secure.

Firstly you can have the console protected by a security certificate (https), you can also have the traffic between the agent and the management service in https instead of http, and also it has two levels of security - first, the Grid control admin security (you have to create separate admins for target groups) and then the database login itself. The sysman password should be withheld from most users of Grid control.

If the security department wants tighter security, please recommend Oracle's Advanced Security Option which allow sql net encryption of all sql traffic and data encryption in the database. Regarding listener ports, you can password protect the listeners. Firewall needs to be opened up for certain other ports of Grid control.

We were using Grid Control in a large corporate site with more than 700 databases and found no issues.

Its a great product so do try to convince your security team. The benefits to the company are immense, and it also improves the life of the DBA teams - it leaves them with more quality time to do their senior DBA stuff, like architecture etc, instead of worrying about scripts for RMAN backups and the setup of Dataguard, or applying patches on multiple databases, which are just some examples of the many things automated by Grid Control. "

EM Desktop Widgets released

Rejeeb Mohammed, User Experience Designer in the EM User Experience Team has sent the following information:

I am so pleased to let you know that, EM grid control team has released the
first set of desktop widgets in oracle open world. EM Desktop Widgets are
lightweight internet applications ( built in Adobe's AIR environment) that
provide persistent desktop access to key Enterprise Manager monitoring and
diagnostic information.

There are 3 widgets available in the initial
release:

Target Search & Monitoring : This widget provides rapid
access to EM targets through quick and easy target searching. Also you can mark
targets as your favorites and monitor their status in real time.

High
Load DB : Provides a summary of the top 5 databases ordered by the Average
Active Sessions performance or load metric.

Service Level and
Monitoring: This widget provides a summary view of a set of services including
the service status and availability, and a status of SLA’s associated with the
service including any alerts.

I encourage you to download the widgets
from http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/widgets/index.html,
and use them.

We absolutely need your feedback to determine what's good
and what's not with the current widgets. We will use this information to
determine the direction of future widgets.

Oracle Open World 2009

I visited Oracle Open World 2009 on invitation by Oracle. I had a press card due to this Enterprise Manager blog that I maintain. I met a number of fellow Oracle ACE directors such as Arup Nanda, Steven Feuerstein and so on.

I had a good look at the new Exadata V2 OLTP database machine from Oracle - the first machine to achieve over 1 million IOs (8K) per second in a single rack. Exciting stuff.

Customer Webcast: Mass Patching of Oracle Databases with Enterprise Manager

This is an interesting webcast from Oracle for Customers:

Mass Patching of Oracle Databases with Enterprise Manager

Date: Wednesday 7 October 2009
Time: 08:00 a.m. to 09:00 a.m. (PST8PDT)

Description:
http://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=159112088&mConfKey=grid

Please register for this.

Third Workshop on Grid Provisioning and Patch Automation

I just conducted a successful third workshop in the Oracle Office at Singapore
on Grid Provisioning and Patch Automation. There were a lot of attendees.
Many who could not attend are asking for repeat seminars.

In the workshop, I introduced the clients to sophisticated Oracle Grid
technology, including RAC, Weblogic server clusters, the Coherence
in-memory data grid, ASM, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM.
I interested a lot of attendees in Oracle VM pools with Enterprise Linux
as a future platform for the Grid. I explained the various Enterprise
Manager Packs, especially the Configuration Management Pack and
the Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack.

Using an Amazon installation of Oracle Enterprise Manager
Grid Control Release 5 with the Provisioning and Patch
Automation pack - thanks to one of my friends who loaned me
this Amazon installation - I was able to successfully demonstrate
patching of twelve 10g databases with 5 patches, showing the
power of Grid Automation. The clients were suitably impressed
by the technology capabilities of Grid Control. At the same time
I told them about Oracle’s support of the Cloud.

I also successfully demonstrated a RAC Rolling Patch upgrade
of a two node RAC cluster, again using the Provisioning and
Patch Automation Pack on Oracle demonstration servers.

The DBA attendees asked for:

Ability to backup the db before the patch is applied – this feature is coming
Ability to rollback patches using Grid Control – this feature is coming
Ability to use PBRUN etc for security – which is already there
Ability to do offline download of patches – already there
Ability to keep a log of all changes done via the Grid Control console
Ability to do in Grid Control 10g what can be done in Database Control 11g eg. REPLAY

I have given this feedback to Oracle development.

Future workshops can be seen on:
http://www.si-asia.com/marketing/oracleworkshops2009/

Interesting questions on Grid Control Patching Automation

In a recent Grid Control Webinar, I heard some interesting questions
by clients that were answered by the Grid Control patching automation
expert in Oracle, Hari, who also writes on this EM Blog. The configuration
question was answered by another Grid expert, Shahid.

I am sharing these answers with you.

Question: Can rollback of patches be done using Grid Control?

Answer: As a part of the procedure, there are validate steps if the patch is
rightly applied or not. Rollback is not available Out-of-box for now, but
you could insert the step into the framework using the metalink note
info - :577557.1

Question: May I know that how frequently Grid Control gathers
configuration changes?

Answer: It is upto you. The interval is configurable. e.g. in the compliance
scenario you would want to gather changes at real time while for standard
application configuration it may be done once or twice a day.

Question: How do I get the details on how to use sudo etc. for patching?

Answer: See the Administrator's guide for provisioning and patching.