Database and Application management has been the
primary goal of Database Administrators for many
years. With the introduction of Oracle 9i, Oracle
has improved many areas of the management infrastructure
to make it easier for the DBA to automate the day
to day management aspects of the database. In this
article we will look at some improvements that are
on their way
Recovery Manager Improvements:
RMAN in 9i implements
some new features that are designed to reduce the
time and effort spent by administrators in performing
routine activities related to backup and recovery.
RMAN features a new friendly interface and enhanced
reporting. To ease backup and recovery operations,
RMAN provides for backup configuration, automatic
management of backups and archived logs based on
user specified recovery window. RMAN also implements
a new policy named recovery window which will control
when backups expire. These features reduce the time
spent by DBA’s on day to day backup management activities.
Rollback Segment Management:
Until 8i, DBA’s had
to carefully plan for rollback segment size, assignment
of transactions and also tune the number and size
of the segments. With 9i, Administrators can assign
a tablespace for Rollback Space and let the database
take care of issues like size, space utilization,
block contention and consistent read retention.
Dynamic Memory Management:
Database Administrators had to traditionally shutdown Oracle Instances in
order to grow or shring the SGA components. Dynamic
Memory Management feature allows the resizing of
the buffer cache and shared pool dynamically. 9i
also introduces self tuning of working memory for
SQL execution by tuning the initialization parameters
controlling the allocation of private memory.
Resumable Statements:
9i allows Database Administrators
to pause or suspend large operations such as a batch
update or data load when the DBA finds an Out of
Space or other condition. This feature allows the
DBA to pause the operation fix the problem and resume
the operation from the point of interruption without
affecting the normal database operations.
Persistent INIT.ora:
9i introduces the persistence
of INIT.ora across multiple shutdowns. This allows
remote activities like startup without having a
local copy of the INIT.ora and also provides immense
help in database performance tuning as parameter
changes that happened due to Internal Self Tuning
and tuning changes made by tools like Oracle Enterprise
Manager can persist across shutdowns.
Oracle 9i also introduces various
features that ease management like Execution plan
history that lets the DBA investigate a bad statement
without having to reexecute it. The introduction
of Oracle Managed Files lets the DBA handle the
space management and removes the extra work of having
to manage the files in the database. A default TEMPORARY
tablespace has been introduced in 9i reducing the
annonying SYSTEM Tablespace usage for temporary
space.