Ah, Steve, thanks for clarifying.  It all becomes clear.

Here...

42!

HTH,
Bambi.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 3:45 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L


No Bambi,

No, no, no... This is not what damagement wants. They don't want you to
develop your own tools and scripts so they are dependent on you. They
want to spent lots of money on a GUI tool they can see and they want a
sales drone to show them how easy it is and tell them that anybody can
be a DBA if they just had this GUI tool. That way, if they don't like
you they can get rid of you and just pluggin another warm body. Sort of
like handing a hammer to an unskilled laborer and saying, "Here, you are
now a master carpenter." By all means stop using that geek stuff like
Perl. Stop being subversive to the system by developing your own stuff
and use the GUI wizbang tool that damagement likes. 



-----Original Message-----
Bellow, Bambi
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 1:35 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L


Adam --

I've done this more times than I can count.  The answer is "it depends
on your environment, your desired results, and, more often than not,
your corporate structure".  Here's some examples:

1)  Monitoring script pages DBA group if X happens, Unix group if Y
happens, Network group if Z happens.  Simultaneously, XTerm windows are
popped up in both Operations and HelpDesk with the name and pager number
of the person paged (via uucp)

2)  Monitoring script sends messages to centralized Error Management
System. Error Management System handles it

3)  Monitoring script finds problem and corrects problem.  If problem
continues, email is generated

4)  Error Management System has external handles (not APIs) which can be
used to call Monitoring Scripts, which need to be modified to ustilize
System's internal structures (sometimes written in French -- *that* was
fun!)

5)  Monitoring script simply sends emails

6)  Monitoring script keeps track of the errors in log files which are
compared to log files from X time ago and only the differences are
reported

7)  Monitoring script has redundancy built in such that the first X
times a particular problem is encountered, the Monitoring System ignores
it, then generates a page

8)  Monitoring script has redundnacy built in such that after the first
time the problem is encountered, a page is sent, and if there is still a
problem 15 minutes later, someone else is paged and so on up the company
ladder

It goes on and on.  This is largely what I've been doing for the past 8
years.  Note that the words "Monitoring script" as used above is
generally an inherently complicated conglomeration of several different
scripts, generally with a governor and/or one or more driver(s),
infrequently on different operating systems, sometimes in multiple
languages and/or utilizing, or integrating with, or extending the
capabilities of, one or more COTS products, which use different
mechanisms to trigger and synchronize them.  Generally, there is some
kind of "IGNORE" functionality which allows for specified downtime for
maintenance, or "ALTERNATE" functionality for unusual yet definable
situations, and hierarchy of tests (if the database is down, that
implies that a subsequent error that a user cannot connect to it has
already been dealt with) and, occasionally has sniffers on other boxes
to determine whether remote scripts need to be run either dependent upon
remote conditions or independent of them.  Sometimes, there is a process
which kicks off other jobs and manages the security.  I particularly
enjoy those where there is fault tolerance built in such that if
Monitoring script X on Machine Y craps out, Machine Z takes over and
runs the scripts until Y is back, then copies the logs back, kicks off
Y, make sure it runs ok, then shuts itself down.  (note to the Oracle-L
historians who might be curious, this change in my utilization is
largely why my posts from 10 years ago were a lot more DBMS/internals
heavy and my posts nowadays are more OS/script heavy.)

Regardless, I hope this answers your question and shows some of the
complexity of what you're asking for...

Bambi.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 1:44 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L


So your approach is to write a series of custom scripts, add them to (I 
assume) oracle's crontab for periodic execution.  Do you have one single

machine (or pair of machines) that monitor remote databases?  Or do you 
install these scripts on each database server?  Do you leverage
dbms_jobs? 
 And relying on email seems kind of iffy -- what happens if you're not 
around to check your email?  Page system?  Escalation matrix in place?

Not trying to ruffle any feathers here, and certainly, I appreciate the 
time requirements in fully answering a question as broad as the one I 
submitted, but I would like to probe further into various strategies.
The 
whole "run scripts to check, install statspack, etc." approach seems
both 
highly unscalable and leaves much to the whim of the individual DBA.  So

what, you've installed statspack?  Do you use it regularly?  Is this a 
manual review, or is some system in place to monitor changes?  How easy
is 
it to deploy this framework?

(Does anyone here use Oracle's SNMP agents for monitoring?  I've
leveraged 
these -- along with a home-grown SNMP NMS (in Perl) -- to some degree at
a 
multiple database site to good effect.)

Are there any 'design patterns for databases' around?  Should we come up

with some?

(I'll post my own notes on the topic of management in a future post -- 
still compiling.)

Adam




<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
12/05/2003 11:09 AM
Please respond to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


To
Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Subject
Re: Database management techniques and frameworks






We have about 20-25 instances here. Nearly all on SUN. I dont touch the 
ones on windows. I also have development responsibilities, so I dont
have 
time for a checklist. 

you need to automate tasks. You cant spend your time reading the alert 
log. you should poll it and get an email when something pops up. Same
with 
chained rows, tablespace sizes, etc... Write scripts for this and send 
your self emails. 

Have statspack snapshots run daily. 

> 
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: 2003/12/05 Fri PM 01:49:30 EST
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Database management techniques and frameworks
> 
> Folks,
> 
> I thought it'd be interesting to take a survey on what techniques and
> frameworks DBA's on this list use to manage their Oracle databases.  I

> imagine that some of us manage only a single database and instance,
but 
in 
> those configurations where there are many instances, multiple 
> databases,

> different platforms/versions, etc., what are some of the strategies 
> for
> management in place?  What daily tasks do you perform, and how do you 
> organize them?  How do you manage user requests (individually or as
part 

> of a larger environment)?  How do you handle jobs?  Organization
> techniques?  Naming standards?  User/application deployment framework,

> etc., etc.?
> 
> (Obviously we could write a book about this -- there's an idea! -- but
> summaries and pointers would be interesting.  Perhaps we can come up 
with 
> a best practices document and associated framework for Oracle database
> management.)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Adam
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> -- 
> Author: 
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