OEM Oracle Enterprise manager graphs are great

The title says it all.

I am really coming round to Oracle Enterprise Manager, OEM, for use in monitoring and troubleshooting performance. I'm with Doug Burns here, who once did a presentation on how he learned to love pictures.

OEM is maturing
gradually
into a
great,
good,
and indispensible
tool.

I cannot express my appreciation for OEM enough.



Am
ai
below
the blog-aggregator
horizon
already?

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*PdV peeks over the edge, then looks over shoulder - twice*

This will not get me credit with Vendors...

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Oracle-OEM, Quest, and Symantec all have competing commercial products,
but today, I am plugging ... :

TORA.
And to a lesser extent, Lab128 (which is effectively free as well).

(If those two are old news to you, I apologize, just close the tab and go click elsewhere)

I will admit that the commercially licensed products are much better.
They are richer in functionality (feature bloat!) then any open-source, free-to-give Tool could hope to be (or are they?). I should also mention that the commercial products often will offer all the goodies, gizmos, spotlights and the key-hangers that my kids like so much. I would never pass up on the free parties, eh, salesevents Seminars with food and refreshments. In that area, commercially licensed product are unbeatable.

But for Sheer Simplicity, for Acutal "Value" I have used TORA for nearly 10 (ten!) years now. My trusty 1.3.8 version dates back to 2001. I always used the free version worked fine on oracle 8, 9 and 10. It still works on 11, and I'm sure that when an 11.2 "problem" pops up at one of our customers, that even the old 1.3.8 version will show my the wait-stats.

Since Quest (bless them, they are the makers of Toad), claimed to have bought TORA in eh... 2003, I had not checked for TORA updates.

But now Timo Raitalaakso (Rafu on OTN, blog can be found Here) from Finland told me TORA is still around.
Version 2.0.0 is available.

Go and check it out at sourceforge, and go find a few references on google...

Then download it and Test It (it is totally for free - Wayhey!). If TORA is right for you, you will become addicted quite easily.

My main reason for having TORA is the server-tuning screen called "wait-events". It offers a free, and quick-to-use alternative to the OEM waitevent graphic.

I can run TORA without need for permissions on OEM (acutally, without the OEM period), and it gives me roughly the same screen. All I need is "PERFSTAT" or any user with sufficient privs (the "advisor" role is fine). If I can run spreport or awrrpt, I can generally also run TORA.

It just takes a tns-entry, and Oracle-Net connection, and then TORA is up and running. Mine runs from my company-windhoze. But there are Linux and Mac builds too.

I combine TORA with some servertool sar, vmstat (unix), lparstat (AIX) or taskmgr (windhoze) and with statspack (AWR for the licensed-lucky).
With those tools, I have solved just about every performance-problem I was given.
(admittedly, my problems tend to be simple - but I'm waiting for the first SOA/SOAP system to overload).

Inside TORA, I run the "server tuning" screen at 10 sec interval (I only use the 3rd tab with the graph and the pie-chart of the wait-events). I tend to disable the other screens, not just to save on sqlnet traffic, but also to keep my windows-lappy running happy.



And Voila, that screen (which predates and resembles the OEM graph...) tells me what is happening right now, and in the last hour. In using it, I have a few dislikes and a wishlist too, but I'll keep that for another time.

Tip: I often configure 12 gridlines and 360 datapoints to have a 5 min grid on 1 hr of data.

I am still of the opinion that real DBA's use SQL*Plus, common sense, and not much more. But if you are into troubleshooting databases, you could do worse then look into these tools.

Oracle 11gR2 buzz and my "Thank You" to Oracle

re-Hi all, and nice to see everyone busy downloading/tweaking the 11gR2.

Must say I havnt really kept up with all the buzz, but when I looked at the new features I tried to be a-typical: I'll not go and sing praise to all the new complexities yet. I'm sure they are fine and wont cause serious trouble. They will come my way in due course.

My 11gR2 buzz ?
I'm on the lookout for the simple stuff that may just be of benefit to a large number of DBA grunts like me. For the moment, I will have to let someone else study the new intricacies of the upgraded root.sh script (Hi Martin, Jason!)

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I have to fuss-up that the most high-tech "fixes" I did in the last year was around conventional locking (TX Enqueue, just app-logic, talk to the vendor), Dynamic-SQL (politely lean on the vendor of the app) tweaking CBO (and not even subtle, just applied some Tapio[link]) and the (system-)statistics. Most of my work didnt come close to proper rocket science, any of you could have done it. The bulk of my assignments seem to involve pushing people, rather then data-blocks. And my email-cc skills have greatly improved in the last months. Sigh.

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Reading the "wotsnew", I still found several gems of simple (I hope) and possibly very usefull features.

There is at least one client that will be interested in "Instance Caging". The site that can benefit from this as the Developers have 100 small, but sometimes nasty databases running on a single machine with 24 CPUs. And sometimes they have an "oops" moment and one instance affects the whole (development) system. Reading up on "instance caging", it is dependent on Resource-manager. That sort of locks me in, I now Have to use this Resource manager malarky... (Guess I'm a Lazy Luddite at heart)

The IGNORE_ROW_ON_DUPKEY_INDEX may well be an instant hit. I will not be able to resist abuse of that one! The benefits are Obvious.
But... (there are at least two buts)
This new hint will lead to a lot of lazy-programmer-style stuff. Potentially as dangerous as the "whenever others" that Tom Kyte is sometimes on about.
And, on a more Friday-philosophical level [link to MWidlake], I dont like the fact that a Hint has an impact anywere but on the optimizer.
I can not stop Oracle from developing (useful!) stuff like this, but it puts "Hints" in a whole different part of the game. Food for thought there.

So let me politely say "Thank You" to Oracle for the new, simple, and easy-to-use(?) features. There are a few more ones, I will explore them further when time permits.

First got to do some prio stuff, such as booking trips and updating the Agenda [link]. Hope to see some of you in Real Life on a conference, a SIG, or a Gig somewhere.