Re: Are Oracle's Live Virtual Courses worth doing?
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:07:07 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <07a2c9a9-5a0a-41c7-b911-5c7c9775f269_at_24g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>
On Jan 9, 4:38 pm, DG problem <skatef..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been trapped on Oracle 9.2.0.8 for years now and finally there is
> talk of upgrading to 11g. So, I've tried to get onto some courses,
> however, there are none in my city. So my boss wants me to do a live
> virtual course. Has anyone done any of these courses and if so do you
> recommend them? Or would it be much better value to fly some where
> that has the courses on?
>
> I've been doing Oracle DB work for about 10 years and was thinking
> that the courses that would be most useful would be Oracle Admin II,
> Data Guard and Enterprise Manager. Although, I currently use Korn
> shell scripts for all of my admin on HP-UX boxes.
>
> I realise that these are very general questions so I'm only after very
> general answers. I personally think I might be better off just setting
> up Data Guard, EM and the DBs on my two Linux test boxes and learn by
> getting my hands dirty.
>
> How useful is EM these days?
Been way too long since I've had any courses, so I can't comment on them. There is enough new stuff, particularly the cbo plan stuff, it surely is worthwhile to get your hands dirty.
I'm on hp-ux, and I find EM pretty useful, as long as you don't completely depend on it, which can certainly be your case with all your existing experience and scripts. In fact, I use it to run backups, and (in 10gR2) have had a couple of cases where dbconsole has completely self-immolated, and my bacon was saved by having the old scripts around while support takes days to figure out that hp-ux really is different than linux and some basic perl scripts delivered simply don't work right. I've found some visualization really helpful, such as being able to see what is in tablespaces and the basic performance screens (you have to pay for the option - I think it is worth it, though you might check s-ash), and the advisors. Quickly grabbing some existing DDL is so much easier than the stored procedure syntax (though I still keep tablespace creation scripts, they're handy for my situation), and having the sql id of problem sql right there in front of you is so helpful. I'm using the term EM interchangeably with dbconsole, I'm not using grid.
I still stick with cron though for most stuff, I may be the minority opinion about that. I've seen bizarre performance issues looking at some dbconsole batch logs, don't know if that's version specific or what.
I really don't use a lot of the features. I have a very sour view of the stuff sending database information out to the net, so I've turned that off, but that may just be me. At times I've seen tx locks that indicate some fundamental coding flaws, often following some unusually high load on the db.
When you do patching, be careful about checking that everything is indeed shutdown when it should be, some of the java on hp-ux seems a bit mulish about letting go of processes. hp-ux is, of course, the red-headed stepchild of Oracle platforms these days. When dbconsole has gone down in flames, I have a much worse opinion of it, but eventually it all gets sorted out, it's just basic crappy open source you can slog through while support gives you wrong procedures to fix it.
I don't even remember OEM anymore.
jg
-- _at_home.com is bogus. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-10/oracle-is-investigated-in-france-over-hp-complaint.htmlReceived on Tue Jan 10 2012 - 11:07:07 CST