Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Forum

On 24th August, I spoke as one of the two Oracle speakers in the Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Forum, a large event held at St. Regis hotel, Singapore. My co-speaker was Peter Yu. We introduced a lot of people to the new capabilities of Enterprise Manager 11g, such as the Sun Ops Center, Business Transaction management, and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI). The attendees were astonished as to what is possible in Enterprise Manager today. Here are a few photos of the event.

My New Grid Control book

Friends,

I am pleased to announce that my new book "Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control: Advanced OEM Techniques for the Real World" is getting ready to be published soon (Fall 2010) by Rampant Techpress:

http://www.rampant-books.com/book_1001_advanced_techniques_oem_grid_control.htm

Please do recommend to all your friends and colleagues, it is a great handy book if you really want to make best use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control.

I have based it on a lot of practical experience and I am sure it will be useful to a lot of you.

Regards,

Porus Homi Havewala
(Oracle ACE Director).

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. "