I have a quick quiz for you.  What does the acronym “OCM” stand for?

A. Ohio College of Massotherapy
B. Optoelectronic Components and Materials
C. Orbit Correction Maneuver
D. Olympic Council of Malaysia
E. All of the above

If you answered (E), you get a gold star.  And you’re either good with tests or have quite the diverse set of interests.  Or you know how to do a Google search.

Focusing a bit more on your job and perhaps pacifying your boss who might be peering over your shoulder at this moment, let’s have a look at the possibilities in the Oracle world:

A. Oracle Certified Master
B. Oracle Connection Manager
C. Oracle Configuration Manager
D. Oracle Change Management
E. All of the above
F. A and C

If you answered (E) again, we’ll give you a silver star this time, but with an asterisk.  Technically you’re right, but from a material standpoint, you’re missing the boat to a certain extent.  Oracle Connection Manager is more regularly referred to as CMAN and “Oracle Change Management” is now commonly called “Change Management Pack”. 

If you answered (A), you get partial credit and should spend a bit less time at your local Oracle University center.  Likewise, if you answered (B) you get partial credit, but to you goes the gold star because that’s what I wanted to talk about today.

In fairness to those who answered (A), my Google search for “ocm oracle” yielded about 1.4 million results.  I decided that going through all of the results might involve a bit more time that I had for this posting, but of the first fifty that I did check, 48 of them had to do with Oracle certification.  Only two addressed the other OCM, Oracle Configuration Manager, which is interesting food for thought.

OCM (okay, let’s just focus on Oracle Configuration Manager now, class) has been around for more than two years now.  For those of you still waiting for Oracle 10g to stabilize before you upgrade, OCM is Oracle’s attempt at improving the effectiveness of requests for support, as well as encouraging customers to take a more proactive approach.  The general idea is that the OCM collector will gather data about your operating environment and Oracle configuration and upload it seamlessly to Oracle Support for private viewing.  Theoretically, this information exchange will help streamline the process of filing a new request and provide further information to support staff that may assist in deflecting, er, I mean, solving your problem, and give you more information about the health of your databases. 

The question begs, however, if this is such a great idea, why isn’t it catching on?  According to the blog posting My Oracle Support and Oracle Configuration Manager by OCM Product Manager Joshua Solomin from blogs.oracle.com, dated 12-3-2008,

“Note that customers need to specifically enable Oracle Configuration Manager in order for it to start collecting configuration information and securely sending this information to Oracle Support. Furthermore, if a customer’s security policies prohibit the automatic sending of configuration information outside of the organization, Oracle Configuration Manager can be configured to work in a “disconnected mode”, allowing the customer’s systems and security administrators the ability to review the information prior to it being sent out to Oracle Support.”

That may well be the case, but if so, Oracle has done a poor job of communicating this message to loyal customers.  If the customer is the primary focus, wouldn’t it be preferable to go out of their way to keep us informed?  And I’m not talking about posting news flashes on Metalink.  How many of us actually have the time to surf Metalink for the latest developments in the world of Oracle Support?

Not to contradict the afore-mentioned blog, but Database Specialists has seen cases where a seemingly unrelated patch install resulted in the OCM daemon starting up and a new cron job appearing on its own.  Recently we were assaulted with an email storm regarding an old 9i database in our testing lab, presumably prompted by missing OCM data on the bugger.  I must say, this does not bolster my opinion of the product, in general.

Another strike against this approach is in the complexity involved.  There are no less than seven documents on OCM on Oracle’s documentation portal, describing subjects from installation and administration to “unauthenticated registrations”, whatever the heck that is.  I mean, who wants to be the OCM administrator at your company?  Don’t everyone jump up and volunteer at once!

So the question remains, if OCM has been around for two years and is still not catching on, nay still raising hackles I must admit, is it really the right approach?  Is it ahead of its time, or just a bad idea?  In Oracle Support’s defense, their assignment is a difficult one.  And I think it’s fair to say that their performance could stand a shade of improvement here and there.  So I can’t blame them for taking bold action and prompting change from their customers.  But I’m not convinced that this approach is correct.  The stealthy nature of OCM and lack of communication from Oracle Support about it lends the more suspicious among us to believe that darker motives are at play.  That seems totally unnecessary. 

Okay, let’s here it from the community:  how do you like this new mindset that Oracle is imposing?