Heavy Duty schema manager tool? (was Re: DBA Jobs)

On 2004-08-08, Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote:
> Thought everyone would like to read this email I received from someone
> that sells hardware for IBM (not DB2). So ends up in a lot of Oracle
> shops.
>
>=====================================================================
> As to the tuning question, well, I've heard several IT directors say
> something to the effect of "We could invest in people, or tools. We
> chose tools". The new automation features in 10G seem to reinforce those
> opinions. It's getting disturbing out there.
>=====================================================================

That only works if the tools aren't crap. Oracle isn't exactly well known for making the best tools. Oracle 10g is no different in this regard.

It is far more likely that companies won't infact buy decent tools and simply will go along with buying the Oracle tools because they are percieved as being part of a package deal (one PO).

>
> So those who think they can still be command line DBAs ... wake up
> and smell the alphabet soup (ASM, ADDM, GRID, OEM, etc.).
>

Where can I find a schema management tool efficient and automated enough to manage changes between 100+ databases all running the same application (and thus the same schema)?

I have been saddled with Oracle's change management pack due to a strange confluence of corporate politics that prevents my DBA group from buying solid 3rd party tools.

While it has some nice features, it requires far too much UI babysitting.

1. Selection of destination instances is painfully crude.
2. Destinations can't be grouped based on deployment level or application.
3. Each destination must be manipulated manually regardless of how trivial the changes are.

A suitable tool would allow for creation of new changes based on templates (Create Like) and fully automated operation so long as exceptions or warnings don't occur. It would be also nice if "fatal exceptions" could be configured (So you don't necessarily stop when a column is already created). It would also be nice if changes could be grouped together as patchsets and executed together.

The tool should only consider schema changes and should be configurable to ignore the sort of tablespace & storage option differences that might occur between dev vs. production instances.

-- 

If OEM is part of Oracle's new spiffy alphabet soup watch out.     
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You might get food poisoning.                                     / | \