HOW THE DBA EVALUATES HARDWARE!

The DBA evaluates hardware resources  by checking whether or not there are enough disk drives available to install the oracle database software. 

What exactly does this mean, but first off, welcome you have just gotten hired as the new Database Administrator. Your first task as directed  in this small shop is to install the newly acquired oracle database software. What do you need to do? You are given a server and told go ahead and get started.

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WHO IS THE ORACLE DBA?

This is my first major post before delving into what exactly the Oracle DBA is required to do. Let us first simplify who an Oracle DBA is and what roles and responsibilities come with the position.

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1. An database administrator (DBA) is the one who administers the Oracle database server.
2. Responsibilities may vary depending on the size of the company the Oracle DBA works for. For instance,  a small company in most cases might have just one Oracle Database Administrator who administers the database for applications and users. While in a Major company, what you would find are several people tasked as Database Administrators with different areas of specialization.

Now here is a list depicting the roles and responsibilities of the DBA

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WHAT KIND OF A DBA ARE YOU?

So earlier today I took a test on basically figuring out what kind of DBA I am and here is the result!

The scientist DBA is brilliant and sometimes shy, hates disorder, chaos and conundrums, and greatly enjoys diving into the internals of their database.

The scientist DBA tends to have a love of music and gravitates towards degrees in “pure” majors such as History, English, Math, or Physics.

Scientist DBAs usually keeps their offices neat and orderly, with everything in its proper place.   Their motto is “Prove it,” and they love to try out their database hypotheses on their test systems. 

• Attention to detail — Scientist DBAs like order in every area of their lives and their database is no exception. Every tablespace and table must stay optimized, and the scientist DBA gets visibly disturbed when a table takes too many extents or when a tablespace becomes fragmented. They miss nothing, and pride themselves on their close attention to every detail of their database.

• High professional standards — The scientist DBA believes that a database can be described with mathematical equations and every assertion about database behavior can be proven with experimentation. They sometimes require all developers to “prove” their changes in the test database, before allowing changes in production. The scientist DBA hates “rules-of-thumb” and revels in finding exceptions to any general assertion about database behavior.

• Highly reliable — Scientist DBAs spend their days in the test systems, posing hypotheses and cranking out scripts to “prove” their theories before making changes to their production system. The scientist DBA is very careful and meticulous and will always justify every database change (often with extraordinary detailed experimental evidence) before changing their production database.

• Extremely eloquent — Some, (but not all) of the scientist DBAs can be identified by their grandiloquent prose. These DBAs love to use obscure words and complex verbal syntax, and normally keep an Oxford English Dictionary (OED) close at-hand. They love puns and double entendres, and enjoy using obsolete words that have not been popular since the early 1800s.

Not bad so here is what this blog will focus on Database Adminstration and of course other Oracle tools you might find exciting; so welcome to the oracle virtual Classroom

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RMAN CONTROLFILE BACKUP

Welcome to oracle virtual classroom where we simplify your understanding of all thing Oracle Software related. We hope you would join us on this journey as we proceed. Today we will be starting off with how to back up your control file using RMAN (oracle's recovery manager). What is a control file in the first place and why do we need to back it up?

Well for starters the control file in an oracle  database stores the status of the physical structure of the database. The control file is a critical aspect of the database, without it the database will not continue its operations and that is the last thing you want to happen to your database.

So here is how your would use rman controfile backup to make a copy of your control file in case your end up with a corrupt file, you will be able to restore your database.

First off connect to RMAN via the command line 

1. $ rman
   RMAN>  connect target user/password
   RMAN> connect catalog user/password
2. To back up the whole database:
   RMAN>  backup database; * if you want back up the database to a specific file use: RMAN> BACKUP DATABASET FORMAT ‘/backup/oracle/%d-%T-%s-%P’;
   Notice that the formatting of this information varies by platform.
     %d   The name of the database.
     %D  The current day of the month (in format DD)
     %M  The month (format MM)
     %Y  The year (YYYY)
     %T  The year, month, and day (YYYYMMDD)
     %F  Combination of DBID, day, month, year, and sequence
     %p  The piece number within the backup set.
     %s  The backup set number.
     %t  The backup set time stamp, which is a 4-byte value

Now the easy way to back up the control file is to issue the following command:
RMAN> backup controlfile;

You can also set the database to backup the file automatically that way you need to constantly worry about the file and here is how you would do that

Configuring RMAN to Automatically Backup the Control File and SPFILE

Simply set CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP to ON, then RMAN automatically creates a control file and an SPFILE backup after you run the BACKUP or COPY commands.

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