International Women's Day

Sorry this is a few days late but thought I would share this. Apologies for the shocking English - nothing to do with me. Joking aside, anything that helps to address gender pay differences and domestic abuse etc can't be a bad idea. Sure somebody will come up with something as funny in November for International Men's Day.

Samba

I have recently been moving a lot of data between Windows and Linux. As much as WinScp is an excellent way of doing that, it is not the only way. Samba allows the mapping of the Unix filesystems into file explorer so they look just like any other windows drive.

https://www.samba.org/

Now I don't want this site just to repeat stuff from other sites so I will point you in the right direction and point out any problems.

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/linux-server-configuration-guide-book-excerpt,2-777-2.html

After installing samba you will end up with a /etc/samba directory with a smbusers file. Now it may be tempting just to edit that file but you should use :

smbpasswd -a <username>

Once you have mapped a drive test it out. There are loads of other ways to get Windows / Unix to share drives but I like Samba as you can give access to individuals or groups and because it has been around for ages is stable and for a lot of sites it is free too.

Monitoring Oracle

Although Enterprise Manager Cloud Control needs a separate license to use it, it is probably one of the best utilities to monitor your estate. Strangely, at one point it needed an 11g Oracle database as a repository and was not compatible with 12c. You can use a 12c database now but not on Oracle Linux version 7.

https://oracle-base.com/articles/12c/cloud-control-12cr5-installation-on-oracle-linux-5-and-6

I use Oracle-Base as a chef would use a recipe book. Follow the instructions and hope you produce something tasty. So rather than put out the same recipe I will point you to the best cook books.

The great thing about Cloud Control is that you can put an agent on a server and monitor what is going on, RAC, Oracle Application Server Farms etc. It is not only Oracle you can monitor, Microsoft SQL Sever too, so a very useful application if you can have access. An alternative would be something like Quest Spotlight but I have only ever been on one site that had this running and that was a few years back so if someone has any recent experience with this please let me know.

https://www.quest.com/video/overview-of-rac-in-spotlight-on-oracle891910/

If you don't have Cloud Control or Spotlight there is still the 12c Database control aka EM Database Express but it is built inside the database server so limited functionality. SQL Developer has some tools for monitoring but most of the time you are back to manually checking the alert log and trace files for problems, running O/S tools like prstat, vmstat, top etc. 

Sys Admin guys can be useful for problems at the O/S level (especially for h/w issues - "dodgy" disks can be a pain) and speak to network teams (firewalls, routers, switches can be a pain). If you have the diagnostics pack run AWR reports when you are seeing issues (remember AWR reports are different for stand alone instances and for RAC).  Most DBAs have their own scripts and if you have been running a system for any length of time you get a "feeling" for what is going on. 

Oracle monitoring is not just a one approach fits all it you often need a holistic approach. I remember after moving a Sun Server the performance was terrible. The only difference was the network had changed so the network lads were getting the blame. After a week I spotted the memory was only half of what it should have been. After a power down and a re-seat of the memory the server was back to what it was. I have learnt that the "Occams Razor" quite often applies when it comes to Oracle.