RE: Oracle newbie

Thanks for the feedback Mike...

I "have the dB" purely in the respect that the box lives in the server room and I'm the network admin on site (NT). ( We also have an HP3000 and HPUX box here that other folks tend to ) As it is running on NT, I am therefore more or less responsible for its health and well being ( backups ). Our "in house oracle person" is the person who knows more about it ( oracle ) than I do - she is very ( very ) limited in her knowledge or experience with the underlying OS and/or any networking though. Her office is clear at the other end of the building too, whereas I'm only 20 feet away from any of the servers from my office. This is not the prettiest thing in the world, as you might well imagine. ( the blind leading the blind come to mind?? ) I plan on obtaining all of the install cd's and whatnot for the product from her and installing it on my own on a test box so that I can play / learn more about it. I will probably go back to borders sometime this week and pick up a book - got any recommendations. I'm thinking one of the "oracle on nt" type books - preferable something geared towards someone like myself - I have the know how where the OS and general networking is concerned - but very little ( none ) with oracle.

-=- J.D. -=-

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Ray [mailto:Michael.Ray_at_trw.com] Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 3:01 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Re: Oracle newbie

JD,
If people are NOT complaining about the performance against this server then I would not worry about your disk or memory config at this point. The server is obviously running and people are "happy" (objective #1). I don't know what Oracle recommends as minimum config, but it is a huge resource hog so I'd bet their minimum is insufficient. However, as I mentioned, if everyone is happy, do not worry about this at all at this point.

As for objective #2, as others have already mentioned, doing cold backups is far easier if you can afford it. This apparently isn't a 24x7 database. Shutdown immediate, copy all the datafiles, control files, redo logs, parameter files, etc to a second disk or tape. Startup database.

Is this a critical database? If so make sure it is running in archivelog mode. You should see something like log_archive_start=true and log_archive_dest=<some path>. Look in some path and if you see some recent files, it is enabled. If it is enabled you need to make sure this dest does not fill up! Keep enough files to cover back to at least 2 cold backups in your case. You can delete those older than that.

I would spend most of your time learning about backup and recovery. When objective #1 terminates, your future job will be determined by how good you did on objective #2 and what would be objective #3 (getting the database back up quickly with minimal data loss).

What is the reason you (with no experience) have this database now rather than your "in house oracle person"?

Michael Ray
Oracle DBA
TRW, Marshall, IL
217-826-3011 x2438

>>> DanversJ_at_gunlocke.com 11/06/00 12:04PM >>>
Hi there...

I have inhereted an oracle server that I need to ensure Received on Tue Nov 07 2000 - 07:32:48 CST