Course Overview

This course brings database administrators beyond a basic understanding of their duties and advanced skills needed to effectively administer an Oracle database installation within a large-scale enterprise. Important subject areas include advanced database configuration, performance monitoring and tuning, configuring for recovery, troubleshooting and fault diagnosis, and use of the extensive advisory framework.

The Database Resource Manager is an essential tool for database tuning and achieving optimum performance and is often used in combination with the advisors. The Database Scheduler is a sophisticated tool that can automate many administration tasks and integrate the database into the larger data center and systems infrastructure. All of the data within a database installation is at risk unless one has designed, tested, and implemented a robust backup and recovery strategy.

When a major failure occurs, a variety of recovery and troubleshooting techniques must be employed. The Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) tool is discussed with additional facilities, including the Data Recovery Advisor, Redo Log File Size Advisor, and MTTR Advisor. It is tempting to shortcut appropriate backup procedures if they perform poorly, so special attention is given to performance optimization.

What you’ll learn

Upon completion of the Oracle Database 11g R2 Administration II course, students will be able to:

• Understand automatic database management, monitoring, and tuning facilities. Included are automatic management of storage space and memory resources within the database and the roles of the Segment Advisor and Memory Advisors.
• Explain automatic resumption of database operations even in the face of storage space allocation failures and errors.
• Set metric and alert thresholds for proactive database monitoring.
• Use deferred segment creation to improve performance and establish efficient use of space.
• Describe globalization features within the database to support applications in multiple languages, currencies, time zones, and countries.
• Utilize diagnostic sources in troubleshooting database problems and employing the Fault Diagnosability Infrastructure, the Database Instance Health monitor, and the Support Workbench to capture and process fault data.
• Configure the database to recover from a wide variety of failures. This includes configuring redo log files and the Flash or Fast Recovery Area.
• Apply Oracle Flashback technology to recover from user errors and from database failures, including Flashback Data Archive and Flashback Transaction Backout as part of the Oracle Total Recall technology.
• Perform other flashback operations, including Flashback Version Query, Flashback Transaction Query, and Flashback Database.
• Control resource utilization on database servers whose resource demand exceeds their capacity.
• Apply advanced resource management for complex configurations involving multiple CPUs and multiple database instances.
• Manage launching routine maintenance tasks and even application functions using the database scheduler.
• Tune the performance of database operations and SQL statement execution using the extensive advisory framework and the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitoring (ADDM) facility. Included in this framework are the SQL Tuning and SQL Access advisors.
• Formulate user-managed and automatically managed backup strategies and database recovery operations using RMAN and other database facilities.
• Database instance recovery, tuning checkpoints, the Redo Log File Size Advisor, and the MTTR Advisor.
• Identify user-managed recovery scenarios, including recovery from temporary, read-only, and index tablespaces.
• Automatically manage backup strategies and database recovery operations using RMAN and other database facilities. Complete and incomplete media recovery, including database point-in-time recovery and tablespace point-in-time recovery.
• Build upon basic RMAN capabilities with a centralized recovery catalog. Deploy standardized and consistent backup and recovery procedures throughout the enterprise by means of dynamic stored scripts and variable substitution.
• Optimize backups for faster performance and parallelization of operations, employing compression algorithms and other strategies for optimum efficiency.
• Interpret data preservation through archival backups.
• Duplicate databases for regulatory compliance, real application testing database replay, test configuration, and other purposes.
• Detect and handle failures and corruption, including the use of RMAN block recovery and the Data Recovery Advisor.