Announcing the launch of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

Representing years of research, planning, and development, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g is set to be unveiled on April 22 by Oracle President Charles Phillips.

If you are in the New York area, join Oracle President Charles Phillips and Oracle Senior Vice President Richard Sarwal for the launch of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. You can register here: http://bit.ly/bqUskZ

It's also possible to show your interest or even if your attending at this LinkedIn event. http://events.linkedin.com/Oracle-Enterprise-Manager-11g-Launch-New/pub/258070

If you're not able to attende the Live event, don't worry about that, we will be live broadcasting it. You can register for that live webcast from this page: http://bit.ly/9Qnh5f

- The Oracle Enterprise Manager team

EM Jobs and Daylight Saving Time

A user reported that:

"The North American Daylight Saving Time (DST) switch happened on the 14th of March. Since then our Enterprise Manager scheduled RMAN backups are running 1 hour later than ususal - essentially they haven't taken notice of the DST switch. We have Oracle 10.2.0.4 on Solaris 10. We use individual Enterprise Manager dbconsoles for each database. My timezone version is 4. Newfoundland Canada, standard GMT offset of -03:30, DST offset of -02:30. Dbtimezone from dual is -02:30 (this is correct). The agentTZRegion from the emd.properties file (for the specific instance of dbconsole, not the global emd.properties file) is Canada/Newfoundland which is correct. But the RMAN jobs in OEM are still showing a GMT offset of -03:30 hours (explaining the 1 hour offset when they run). These are my two questions/issues:
1. Shouldn't that offset have auto-corrected to -02:30 when DST occurred?
2. I can't change the jobs to have an -02:30 GMT offset because that option doesn't exist in my Time Zone drop down list when trying to schedule an RMAN backup via OEM. Is there an additional patch I need to apply?"

My answer:

Mate, did you search in Metalink for this issue? I found a note that explains your particular case perfectly:

Jobs In Dbconsole Shows One Hour Difference After Dst Patch Is Applied [ID 749147.1]

The reason is simple - your JDK and JRE was not made DST compliant. Simply follow the
instructions in Note:553534.1 after stopping the DBCONSOLE on each node, then restarting it again.

The issue has nothing to do with Enterprise Manager 10g or its jobs system which is quite good, and better in Enterprise Manager 11g. Certainly better than crontab jobs that we DBAs have been doing for years. And who wants to use a crontab when we have a central Grid Control job system controlling multiple unix servers?

Oracle really wants to hear from you! - Patching Survey

Welcome, Oracle really wants to hear from you!

If you are involved with the patching process (evaluating, approving, testing, or deploying), Oracle wants to hear from you. Our primary focus is on how to improve this process for Oracle customers.

We sent this to you because you either; responded to a previous survey or forum post where we asked if you would participate in future studies, or are currently involved with downloading patches from My Oracle Support.

This survey IS NOT for providing general feedback about Oracle products or My Oracle Support. Please use your support process for that type of feedback.

This survey will take about 10 to 15 minutes.

You will be prompted concerning Oracle Database/Middleware, E-Business Suite (Oracle Applications) and Enterprise Manager.

The survey will automatically skip the areas which you respond as not applicable.

Concerns? Want to verify this is from Oracle? Email us directly.
My Oracle Support and Enterprise Manager Patching Team
ajay.prasad@oracle.com

Take the Survey

More comments on Grid Control Book

Friends, here are a few more comments that I received on my upcoming book on Grid Control:

I read the briefing on OTN hope I buy the book and will see how it can help.
Between Grid, cloud and RAC the concept is still a bit cloudy.

Congratulation for this achievement & Thanks for telling. I will wait for
this to be available in market.

Porus, Its great to know that finally some one wrote a very valuable book
for all of us. But I would strongly recommend if you could add additionally
topics related to setting Events, alerts, strategies used in practical
production environments and also customizing the reports, Dashboards and adding
additional few steps to add layer of analytical queries (using the Metadata) to
create ITIL based reporting using various Mgmt repository tables. That way not
only DBA's can use GRID but it can help the Upper Management as well.

My reply:

Thanks guys. Great to know that you appreciate the book. Yes, definitely I have some ITIL content with customization of a few reports. I am not concentrating on events and alerts, I think every other book does that - they look at the "monitoring" aspects of Grid Control and seem to forget the "management" aspects. For eg. Service level management.

Lots of interest in new book

Friends, I have received lots of interest in my new upcoming book (http://www.rampant-books.com/book_1001_advanced_techniques_oem_grid_control.htm), thanks for that.
Here are some of your comments, thanks a lot guys. The book is to be published this Fall 2010.

That is a fantastic news Porus. I will definitely read this book. Do let me
know once it is out in the market. All the very best to your book.

Congrats Sir, will spread the mail around to all my tech staffs.

Congradulations!!! I will look for it.

Congratz on publishing the new book Porus.

Congratulations on the new book. I am wondering if there is a way to get an advance copy of this book either in electronic format or in physical format? I am very interested in this subject.

Porus - Congratulations on completing the book. I will like to get a copy for myself once available in the market.

Well done on putting the book together.I will keep an eye out for it downunder in Australia.

Congratulations on the publication of your New Book!

Eager enough to buy your book on Grid Control as we have installed 10g Grid Control in our environment and I'm sure it'll be boon to us.

Congratulations Porus. Will definetly by it! I with you to finish this book with success.

Congrats !!! Looking a lot more like this....

Congratulations !I am sure that will help lots of DBAs to upgrade from DBA v1.0 to DBA v2.0 in Oracle's terminology.

Good Luck with this.

Congratulations big achievement

Went through the details of your book, it's really a comprehensive guide for the GC guys. Best of luck for your efforts & continue with you endeavour.

Good Luck Porus, would be an interesting read.

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).

EM for Active-Passive environments

A DBA wrote to me and said he has some issues in seeing the targets in a 2 node active
passive cluster using SUN cluster. My advice to him was as follows:

Refer to the Oracle documention chapter "Configuring Oracle Enterprise Manager for Active and Passive Environments"

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B16240_01/doc/em.102/e10954/actpass_env.htm#sthref274

As per this, the EM agent must be deployed to each physical node as well as to the logical IP address. You have obviously not done that. Setting up in an active-passive environment is more involved as compared to setting up in an active-active cluster (Oracle RAC!)