Before I forget

We have been dealing with a number of issues here; a whole slew of number one priorities. =) So quickly, aside from Global Campus and all that fun, here are some other things we need to dig into:


1) A solid method (I hate when people say "methodology" when they could simply say "method") to apply Oracle Critical Security Patches (aka, CPU). Just came across the Best Practice White Paper (March 2007). One of the little gems I was alerted to (thanks Job!):

You can detect potential patch conflict in advance by running the following command:
opatch apply -silent -no_bug_superset -report
The –report option detects any conflicts without applying patch.

2) Clean up the state of our Backup & Recovery policies. I am tempted to say we need to rewrite the whole thing, but I do not think it is that drastic. We probably should look into incremental backups more closely (see previous post), get more aggressive with rman-to-tape backups in light of ASM, and make sure we are all good to go on all types of Recovery.


3) The Grid cometh..... Get more comfortable with Enterprise Manager Grid Control. I referenced Logan McLeod earlier; I think he gave us a little present in terms of documentation. Maybe. But I can not talk about it.

Reading the documentation: incremental backups

Some smart people have recommended that I simply read the documentation from front to back. Tom Kyte suggested that when he was in town for our local IOUG, and Job Miller has mentioned it a few times. Reading is hard, especially a technical document. Even if you only focus on a few of the books; my brain is well-trained to expect sci-fi/fantasy when I read. *grin*

There is a ton of good stuff in the documentation. I have to give a standing ovation for the folks that write them. Yes, sometimes there are errors, or an old section is apparently skipped over during a version upgrade. But by and large, it is good stuff!

Just today I was reading about incremental backups. And I came across this little feature I had not realized before:

To reduce backup sizes for NOARCHIVELOG databases. Instead of making a whole database backup every time, you can make incremental backups.

source


Wow, that is quite handy. So if you are ever tempted to put a DEV database in archivelog mode just to get point-in-time recovery, you can go with incremental backups instead. How cool is that?

Of course, there are a lot of other handy ramifications of using incremental backups (ie, a precurssor to snapshot standby's, you can convert your physical standby to a reporting database and then convert it back at the end of the day).