Have you found that daily full database backups are becoming impractical for your growing databases?  Incremental backups are no longer the exception in some shops.  But with the increased complexity comes a greater responsibility for thoroughly planning and testing your backup solution.  Testing a more complicated backup solution makes for a more complicated validation procedure.  [...]

Using a Physical Standby database (aka Data Guard) is one of the most effective ways to protect your database and improve its availability.  My colleague Jay Stanley wrote a great blog on this subject: http://www.dbspecialists.com/blog/database-backups/need-uptime-use-and-oracle-physical-standby-database/.
The Standby database can be activated in the event of a disaster or it can be done for maintenance reasons, such [...]

If you are familiar with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on 10g, you have likely seen output from crsstat that looks something like this.  This is from a 10.2.0.4 two node RAC cluster.  Notice that each instance is listed (RACDB1 and RACDB3) as well as the database itself (RACDB).
 
[oracle@node15 ~]$ crsstat
HA Resource                                   Target     State
———–                                   ——     [...]

Oracle Restart is a new feature of Oracle 11 that will automatically restart certain Oracle processes in the event of a failure.  A manual shutdown will not cause it to restart, as Oracle assumes you intend for it to be down.  This is a great feature and can really help minimize downtime in certain cases.  Imagine your production database [...]

This is something that I learned recently that made me wonder why I never knew it previously.
Over the years, I have had many occasions when I needed to kill a database session and would
use the “alter system kill session ’sid,serial#’” syntax. This works fine for the most part.
The database session will show a status of [...]

My initial goal was simply to create a test ASM environment on my PC running Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle Database 11.2.0.2. The first step was easy…download and install Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.1. This went without a problem until I ran the ASM Configuration Assistant (asmca) and realized that ASM couldn’t see any available [...]

As with any DBA my days are filled with what seem to be unrelated tasks to the profession - writing reports, attending meetings, installing releases, planning capacity, answering alerts, patching binaries and  running upgrades.  It is easy to forget three things I should be focusing on as a remote DBA:

Security
Availability
Performance

Some aspects of these core [...]

In the Oracle RDBMS, one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts I see in doing remote database administration, is the role and importance of redo.

Sooner or later, every DBA will need to address how to manage storage capacity in their databases. Nearly every database needs more storage as time goes on, and without attention, the database will fill up, and new data/inserts can’t happen. It’s been my experience that bad space mangement is the root cause of a high [...]

Over the years of experience with Oracle databases, there is one feature, far more than any others, that has proved itself again and again in the real world; I speak of course, of the Oracle Physical Standby feature.