Grid DBA

Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) has now become a buzzword in the IT industry. Organizations are starting to r ealize the benefits of database as a service thanks to the ubiquity of "The Cloud". Companies relying on Oracle databases for managing their data can also get on the DBaaS fast track thanks to Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. Using EM12c you can enable self-service and rapid provisioning of Oracle databases and enjoy all the benefits (well most) of Cloud computing.  EM12c supports both IaaS and PaaS models. These are also tightly integrated with Oracle VM Server along with their engineered systems including Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Setting up and configuring DBaaS requires several steps. While these are well-documented , it seems like a daunting task for those who are unfamiliar with process. A list of steps required to setup DBaaS include the following: ■Create Roles and Users ■Setup Privilege Delegation ■Add Hosts ■Configure Software Lib...

Disclaimer: The steps described in this post have only been tested in a lab environment. Verify that your organization's security policy isn't being violated when doing any of these steps. Twitter is a public social networking platform and has inherent security risks. I will not accept responsibility if you perform this in your production environment. Many applications built in the past couple of years have integrated social networking widgets (useful or not) to connect a social world via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. However, most enterprise applications still rely on email as the primary notification method. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c allows us to send notifications for incidents, events, jobs out of the box via email. In addition, EM12c supports advanced notification methods including OS scripts, PL/SQL scripts and SNMP traps. For the complete description of Notification Methods you can read the chapter in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control...

This post is mostly a reminder to myself on how to install an EM12c shared agent. I found the documentation somewhat lacking, so I hope this will help someone else attempting to perform a shared agent installation. With a shared agent installation, a master agent is installed on a shared filesystem such as NFS and a shared agent is "installed" on remote hosts. The remote hosts should have read-only access to the share. The documentation lists the following pre-requisites for the mount options on the remote host. mount -t nfs -o ro : For example, run the following command: mount -t nfs -o ro abc.oracle.com:/scratch/masterAgent /scratch/sharedAgent Since I use a NAS for serving NFS shares in my environment I replaced the master_agent_host_name with the name of the filer and the exported volume. The shared agent will have its agent instance located on a local file system which contains configuration and host-specific information. When deploying an agent on N...

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control incorporates the use of plugins to extend its functionality for management of the complete cloud stack. Plugins are provided for databases, middleware, virtualization among others. For a few weeks I had been struggling to deploy Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c agents on IBM AIX 6.1 targets. This became a very lengthy cycle of patching, searching and tweeting in an attempt to get things going. I finally had the agent deployed on the hosts but no targets were being discovered. After coming across   MOS Note [ID 1388143.1]   I discovered that I needed to update and deploy the database plugin in order to discover the database targets. To deploy plugins go to Setup->Extensibility->Self Update From this screen you can see a list of plugins and their status. If there is an updated plugin available it will have a non-zero revision number in the Revision column and the status will be available. The Oracle Database plugin upda...