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Oracle Web Conference (OWC), the latest means of support from Oracle, provides for collaboration between you and Oracle Support. OWC allows the Oracle Support engineers to monitor the issues and problems within your own environment using both telephone and the Web to troubleshoot. You can download the archives of the web conference afterward.

You can also look into Oracle Advanced Customer Services, which focuses on providing continual operational improvement of the Oracle environment in your organization.

Many of the daily tasks DBAs perform on a database involve monitoring for problems. This can mean running monitoring scripts or using the Oracle built-in tools, such as Enterprise Manager, to keep track of what s actually happening with the database. A good example of something you ll want to monitor closely is space in the database. If you run out of space on a disk where a database table resides, you can t insert any more new data into the table, and the transactions will fail. Of course, you can fix the problem by adding the requisite amount of space and rerunning the transaction. But if you were properly monitoring the database, you would have been alerted through a page or an e-mail that the particular table was in danger of running out of space, and you could have easily avoided the subsequent Oracle errors. You ll normally check the reports generated by your monitoring scripts on a daily basis to make sure no problems are developing with regard to disk space, memory allocation, or disk input and output. Enterprise Manager is a handy tool for getting a quick, visual idea about various issues, such as memory allocation and other resource usage. The monitoring scripts, on the other hand, can provide

summarized information over a lengthy period of time; for example, they can provide interval-based information for an entire night. It s also worthwhile to study the alert log (the log that Oracle databases maintain to capture significant information about database activity) on a regular basis to see if it s trapping any errors reported by Oracle. You may do this alert log monitoring directly, by perusing the log itself, or you could put a script in place that monitors and reports any errors soon after their occurrence in the alert log. You will need to take some action to fix the Oracle errors reported in the alert log. Based on the nature of the error, you may change some parameters, add some space, or perform an administrative task to fix the problem. If the problem has no fix that you are aware of, you may search the MetaLink database and then open a new TAR with Oracle to get help as soon as you can. Oracle, like every other software company, is constantly improving its software by releasing upgraded versions, which usually have newer and more sophisticated features. It s your responsibility as a DBA to be on top of these changes and to plan the appropriate time for switching over to new versions. Some of these switches might be to completely upgraded versions of software and may require changes in both the applications and the DBA s configuration parameters. Again, the right approach is to allow plenty of time for testing the new software to avoid major interruptions in serving your customers.

As you progress in your journey as an Oracle DBA, you ll have many satisfying experiences as well as some very frustrating and nerve-racking moments. In the following sections, I make three important suggestions that will help you when you are going through the latter.

Although it s always nice to figure out how to improve performance or recover an almost lost production database on your own, know when to call for help. It doesn t matter how much experience you gain, there will always be times when you re better off seeking advice and help from someone else. I ve seen people lose data as well as prolong their service disruption when they didn t know what they didn t know. You can t successfully manage production databases by basing your decisions on incomplete knowledge or insufficient information.