Grid DBA

The Oracle RAC Assurance team has been working on a handy little goody for quite sometime. RACcheck as the name aptly implies turns out to be quite useful at checking your RAC configuration for any issues as well as provides recommendations for correcting them. It checks database, ASM, Grid Infrastructure and Clusterware components as well as infrastructure level components such as OS, storage and network. Setup is straightforward and you can run it as the database installation owner (oracle). Root or sudo privileges are required for some checks. MOS Note 1268927.1 describes it in detail. So far it works on RedHat Linux, AIX, and Solaris SPARC and SuSE Linux. Please note that bash is required for running this utility so if you're using an OS such as AIX which doesn't have bash installed by default you may want to discuss this with your systems administrator. Here's the HTML output of running RAC Check against a 2-node 11.2.0.2.3 cluster running on AIX 6.1. Results are al...

Just a quick note to self when adding datafiles located on ASM when using Data Guard. If the initialization parameter STANDBY_FILE_MANAGEMENT is set to AUTO then any datafile added on the primary database is automatically propagated to the standby site. Before adding the datafile on the primary site you need to verify that adequate disk space is available in the disk groups on both primary and standby. If not done, then your managed recovery will cease to operate thus causing risks to your disaster recovery database. Consider the example below. Datafile gets added on the primary database. ALTER TABLESPACE "FTSBCAUDIT" ADD DATAFILE '+DG_DATA' SIZE 8G REUSE AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 100M MAXSIZE UNLIMITED Fri Oct 21 18:49:22 2011 Starting control autobackup Control autobackup written to DISK device         handle '/archivelogs/ftsora01/ftpprd/c-117026708-20111021-13' Completed: ALTER TABLESPACE "FTSBCAUDIT" ADD DATAFILE '+DG_DATA' SIZE 8G REUSE ...