Re: How to CM an Oracle DB

Mark wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have been doing Configuration Management for over a year now. Recently,
> I have been put on a new project as the CM Manager. This project uses an
> Oracle DB and uses Oracle financials. Oracle Designer2000 and Developer2000
> are used to work on/develop the DB.
>
> I have encountered two issues regarding the above:
>
> 1) The politial issue is that the DBA and Oracle developers feel all CM
> should be concerned with is keeping track of the DB patches (which they
> maintain themselves in their environment). This scope of CM is not
> anywhere close to being acceptable. If CM is to manage (and be
> responsible for) the configuration of the system (in system test and in
> production), the database needs to be CM'd just like everything else,
> especially since its the heart of the system.
>
> 2) The functional issue is that I do not know how to CM a DB. I cannot
> find any resourses that describe how a database should be CM'd. The
> books I have go into painful detail about SCM, but don't mention
> anything about databases.
>
> Does anyone know of any resourses I can refer to or can anyone provide
> any type of help or suggestion regarding CM of databases?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Mark
> mso_at_doubled.com
Hi Mark,
Apologies upfront if I'm on the wrong track re configuration management.

Oracle database configuration is suggested by Oracle to follow certain guidelines to ensure healthy and productive system usage.

Oracle proposes following their "optimal flexible architecture" (OFA) guidelines to accomplish this. The guidelines address the physical layout, and io distribution characteristics of the database. This is described in the Oracle press DBA Handbook as regards Oracle datafile layouts. The oracle installation itself will suggest OFA compliance as regards the physical layout of Oracle software.

Further, several resources are available to extend CM to development efforts. (again, I'm guessing here since I've no formal experience with the term) WWW.REVEALNET.COM has archives that address standardized use of PL/SQL. Oracles Application Developers Guide addresses generic development approaches. There's plenty of third party books addressing Oracle, Oracle and client server development, etc.

Most production and development systems fall down in the design of the database objects themselves. Poor understanding of tablespace,table,and index usage can cause unstable systems. Many systems are't designed to leverage the capabilities of triggers and procedures/ packages and suffer as a result. Lack of application tuning accounts for over 90% of all performance problems (Oracle's figures - not mine, though I agree). I would suggest that CM could also address standardization and consistency in object design as well as creation, utilization of ll the appropriate database features, and CM could address tuning efforts as well. This is another area where DBA's and developers need to work together.

As regards the post re the DBA and not using development/ test scripts against production databases - what is the alternative? No offense to the DBA's (I call myself one ;) but you need an implementation test environment where the developed and tested scripts can be run against a production like (but not production) environment. If the scripts work there you have a reasonable expectation that they will work in production. In my opinion, it should be absolutely expected that the scripts used to build/modify in test be the same ones used in production. (Obviously there may be some changes due to instance names etc.) It's something to strive for.

That's my opinion for what it's worth.

Cheers and good luck,
Terr Received on Mon Oct 27 1997 - 00:00:00 CET