Karen Reliford

As mentioned in my last article, Oracle has made great strides in providing tools and techniques for administrators to be able to take steps to proactively monitor their systems and one of the new features that has been introduced to help monitor (and in some cases streamline the monitoring) is Incident Manager. The key pieces […]

Monitoring target systems is a critical responsibility of today’s database and system administrators. DBAs and SAs are responsible for ensuring our systems are available, that their performance is within acceptable parameters, and watching out for any kind of error conditions and/or unusual behavior patterns. Oracle has made great strides in providing tools and techniques for […]

One key area of concern when it comes to our IT infrastructure, continues to be security, in particular user security.  In the Oracle world, this concern exists at all levels from the front-end applications, to the middle tier level we use for deployment, to the back end tier or database layer,  to the tools that […]

One key area of concern when it comes to our IT infrastructure continues to be security, in particular user security.  In the Oracle world, this concern exists at all levels from the front-end applications, to the middle tier level we use for deployment, to the back end tier or database layer,  to the tools that […]

As the Oracle family of products continues to expand and evolve, management and maintenance continues to be a big chore for administrators.  Since the days of 9i when Oracle first introduced the stand-alone java tool (Oracle Enterprise Manager), Oracle has focused on creating a robust tool to help administrators with the increasingly complex and challenging […]

After nearly a year’s hiatus from writing for Database Journal, I’m very glad to be back, and to finally be finishing the second part of my article on my favorite new features in Oracle 11g Data Guard, their primary product for protecting databases and an integral part of many Disaster Recovery plans. Let me start […]

Disaster recovery is an ongoing concern for Oracle database administrators. Taking steps and configuring systems for recoverability is a major area of responsibility, and in the Oracle world, there are many solutions available to us. Among these solutions are Real Application Clusters (RAC and potentially extended RAC), Oracle Streams and Oracle Data Guard. When a […]

An important decision that DBAs make when they are first creating a new Oracle database is what the standard database block size should be. Once the database is created, it is virtually impossible to change the standard block size without recreating the entire database. Read on to learn how to create tablespaces with different block […]

The introduction of the Oracle Grid Infrastructure product essentially combines Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and Oracle Clusterware into the same oracle home and product. With this new configuration, five main changes have been incorporated into Oracle Database 11g RAC. Read on to learn more. With the release of Oracle Database 11g R2 a fundamental change […]

One of the maintenance challenges with RAC is maintaining all of the client connection files (TNSNAMES.ora) every time a change is made to a cluster database configuration. A new feature of Oracle Database 11g RAC databases, and a primary benefit, is the Single Client Access Name (SCAN). Read on to learn more… One of the […]

Oracle DBAs have many different areas of responsibility and accountability for the database that they maintain. With many applications using middle tier connections, DBAs face an interesting challenge in limiting access and auditing end user activities. Oracle offers an option called proxy authentication that can help to address these challenges. Oracle DBAs have many different […]

Oracle Application Express (APEX) is a product provided by Oracle that is used for rapid application development to create web enabled applications to run against an Oracle database. Being primarily a developer’s tool, the question arises…should DBAs be overly concerned about APEX? And the short answer to this question is…YES! The three main reasons that […]