Grid DBA

I don't normally do product reviews, but at the request of my fellow Oracle tweeps (@hillbillytoad) I have attempted to do my first review in this post. Here goes. While working on a project to implement a new enterprise backup software for Oracle (EMC Avamar), I was asked certain questions about the Oracle database backups - how large are the database backups? What is the growth rate of backups? What is the rate of change of databases? How many databases are backed up per hour? How many level 0 and level 1 incremental backups are done over a period of time? It's relatively straightforward to get this information from one or two databases but a little bit more challenging across the enterprise with hundreds of databases. We can query the v$ views in the target databases - v$database, v$backup_set, v$backup_set_details, v$rman_status etc.. or their recovery catalog counterparts rc_database, rc_backup_set, rc_backup_set_details (see summary of RMAN catalog views   here ). Separ...

Having worked on Oracle RAC since 9i, there hasn't been a time when I haven't faced something new or realized something was not what I thought it was. I think this is one of the reasons why I enjoy working on these systems - always a challenge. I stopped my RAC database to put it into noarchivelog mode using the srvctl command [oracle@oradba10t oracle]$ srvctl stop database -d labrac Next I proceeded to connect to the first instance to startup in mount mode [oracle@oradba10t oracle]$ sqlplus /nolog SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production on Thu May 5 09:47:15 2011 Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All Rights Reserved. SQL> conn / as sysdba Connected to an idle instance. SQL> startup mount ORA-29760: instance_number parameter not specified Wait, what's this? I've never encountered this error message before. Googled a bit and realized that most of the responses were a bit far fetched since the database had been in perfect working order before I stopped...