Grid DBA

The Delphix Data Virtualization Engine allows DBAs to spend less time cloning and refreshing databases and focus on other import tasks - like golf or your favorite activity. In full disclosure, I tried golf once and was ' turrible ' at it. In all seriousness, having the ability to spin up a virtual database (VDB) in a matter of minutes shaves hours or days off of manual, mundane and error prone work. This makes customers (developers, analysts) happy too. Not only can you quickly and easily create full read/write copies of their production data, they also get the time machine-like ability to go backwards and forwards with their data, which opens up a world of possibilities. As a database administrator, I've spent way too many hours creating clones of databases for development, test and reporting purposes. Cloning or duplicating multi-terabyte databases can take a very long time. Oracle databases, in particular, can become complex depending on how the clone is being pe...

One of the many necessary and frequent tasks that a database administrator performs before creating a database is installing the Oracle database binaries. These binaries form what is known as an Oracle Home (referenced by the ORACLE_HOME environment variable on Linux and UNIX environments). Unfortunately, this is also one of the most mundane and uninteresting tasks a DBA can perform. So like all good DBAs know, the best way to deal with such repetitive task is to automate it. Automating installations of Oracle database binaries enables us to reliably repeat the process to enable faster installation as well as provide identical copies of the software in multiple environments. Fortunately, Oracle allows us to clone the Oracle database binaries from one environment to another. Cloning your Oracle binaries from a source copy with all the necessary patches applied enables us to have gold images which can then be deployed to multiple environments. The procedure for cloning an Oracle home...