Complaint about Enterprise Manager (version 10g)

First off, let me say that EM has some really cool stuff going on! This post will be largely negative and critical, but I do not want to discount the fact that the developers of this tool have done a lot of hard work to make some things very neat and slick. Real-time data for performance monitoring at various levels is quite nice. While the interface is kooky (very!), I have to give credit for the massive conglomeration of features that are packed into this "free" tool. And most of them work to boot! *grin*

Ok, so my first gripe is just administrating the EM itself. The logfiles are a complete mess. There is no one log file that summarizes all the activity. If you get an error in the GUI, it will most likely say "see log file for further details". Which log file? Granted, most of them are in one place (depending on if you are using DBControl or GC), but not all of them. Worse, it is very common to find a logfile that repeats what you saw on the GUI and it refers to itself for further details! How is that helpful? I want one file that can either tell me where exactly the problem is, or at least point to the file where the real further details are. Same for the config files. There are xml fiels sprinkled throughout, and .properties. Since EM is comprised of so many different components, there are many different log files and many different configuration files. But nothing ties them all together. Say I want to alter the ports of the components (I have tried this, and it is not pretty). I had to touch about 5 or 6 different files, each with multiple entries for various port numbers. And then there are those ports that are defined by global variables, with no indication where those are set. If one wanted a headache, a lemon-encased gold brick to the skull would be more appealing.

What next.... The GUI itself is extremely cluttered and the opposite of intuitive. I understand that some tools take a while to learn how to navigate (ie, TOAD - still catching on), but there are some functions I use quite often and I always find myself in the wrong place. Here is a tricky example, how about "Historical SQL". Do you mean the sql that EM has generated on your behalf, or AWR SQL? What about "features" that do not work quite well. We have tried Data Masking and Change Capture, both of which hung and finally died without any visible productive work. And trying to debug that?? See above paragraph. =) Or how about that infamous "remove datafile" option in the Tablespace screen? Cool, I did not know you could remove a datafile from a tablespace, this must be new. Yeah, try it and get back to me on that. I have had the opportunity to Queisce my database by accident; if you flip through the Maintenance Window management screens (just click ok or next), you can freeze your database because one of the options to specify the type of the current maintenance window defaults to Quiesce, even if that is not the current type. Handy, eh?

I am curious what the 11g EM will be like. I briefly looked at the 11g Database Control, but not enough to make any kind of judgement. Would it be foolish to even hope that the administration side of things has been made easier?

'nuff for now.

Tackling the 10g dataguard GUI

After hearing all these great things about the dataguard management in 10g EMGC (our shorthand for Enterprise Manager Grid Control) and having been badly scarred from the 9i dataguard implementation, I just had to try this out.

For starters, I tried to create a database. Strangely, EMGC which can clone Oracle Homes, deep-drill into performance problems, manage tablespaces, backups, workloads, stats, coffee cups, user objects, and can slice-n-dice the universe, this EMGC... I could not find a button to create a database. Maybe I missed it. Which is easy to do in EMGC, because it has so many features (most of which work quite well), so many links and buttons and gizmos and ways to get to where you think you want to go. But I could not find "Create Database". So I opted to clone instead. I was not disappointed, either. The prompts and progression of screens was very intelligent, logical and reassuring. I have found that to be the case with a number of "advanced features" in EMGC; of course, there are times when you come to expect such great performance and useability and you run head-first into a brick wall of errors. But I'll get to that in a second...

Database, check. Navigate to the Data Guard section under "Management", and the feeling that you are being well cared for continues. Create Standby. Oops, no spfile. EMGC reports that you need to create an spfile. Strange that the GUI does not offer to do that for you. It is really simple; "create spfile from pfile;" and reboot the database. Ok, spfile, check. Create Standby.


What does that mean? No details, no message, no mention of a log file. This is my most frequent and biggest complaint with EMGC to date. They often forget to inform the user where they can look for more details. "Go to the log file" you would think. This is EMGC, which of the many logfiles do you want to look in? I do some looking around and spot emoms.log, which has a couple more characters, but still quite useless:

2007-05-08 15:08:15,273 [EMUI_15_08_15_/console/database/dataguard/create] ERROR em.dataguard validate.1125 -
CreateBean: ClassNotFoundException: null
2007-05-08 15:08:15,286 [149::EMUI_15_08_15_/console/database/dataguard/create] ERROR jobs.dbclone executeQuer
y.173 - TemplateUtil.executeQuery(): SQLException: Closed Connection SQL is
SELECT status FROM v$instance

So, gritting my teeth, I file an SR. I should have a separate blog entry on that. Filing SRs for OMS is not that fun. But... let us not digress anymore.

So after 20 hours, my SR is still unsolved. Fortunately, I did some simple experimentation and found that if I put the database in archivelog mode, the standby creation is just hunky dory. So again, why would the GUI not do that? Very simple to do. And why the ultra cryptic error?

Archivelog mode, check. Create Standby; finally, the GUI goes to the next screen and asks for some specifics. I want a standby on a remote host, using ASYNC LOG transport (MAXIMIZE Performance). I fill in passwords and click Submit. I am treated with a status of sorts ("View Job") and after 10 minutes or so (yes, a small database), I have a fresh, hot out of the oven standby database with a dataguard broker all set up. Cool beans!

The dataguard management screens are adequate. You can change the standby mode between Protection, Availability and Performance with a few clicks; these operations do a lot of work in the background, like create standby redo logs and reconfigure both sites. Very nice. There is an option to run a test application that generates a bit of redo (1.5 mb/sec in my case), which is another nice feature to do a really simple load test of your configuration. When in MAXIMIZE PERFORMANCE mode, I could not find a way to switch between ARCH transport and REDO; again, another easy operation that I would expect to see as part of the management screen.

Overall, I am pleased with this version of the dataguard GUI. I still have an itch over those errors, but at least the major objective was accomplished with no bloodshed. I plan to play around a little more with Failover and Switchover.