Oracle R11i/R12 Applications DBA Concepts and Administration Review by ...

Barbara Matthews attended Mike Swing's Oracle R11i/R12 Applications DBA Concepts and Admininstration class last week. Here's her review:

So last week, I decided to refresh my E-Business Suite Applications DBA skills. I spent a week in lovely Salt Lake City at the TruTek offices. My goal when I take training, read a paper, or attend a presentation, is to walk away with what I'll call a "golden nugget". A golden nugget for me is something that I wouldn't have known otherwise, something that caught my attention and that I knew would be very useful. As it turns out, I picked up several golden nuggets in this class, so I'll share some of them with you here.

First off, this class is a mixture of lecture and hands on work. Mike has a very deep understanding of the Applications. His biggest difficulty appears to be clamping down on the firehose of information that he wants to share. "Better too much than too little!", I say. Well, I said that until I had to hand my luggage over at the airport, where I worried that Mike's 7 pound class handout would tip me over the luggage weight limit.

The class covered topics that I knew would be useful for an Apps DBA. On Monday we covered the 11i architecture, a hands on workshop where we installed Release 11.5.10.2, information about oraInventory, the 11i file system, and the shared $APPL_TOP. I found the shared $APPL_TOP discussion to be particularly helpful, because I knew that companies should use it, but didn't know the exact details of how to implement it. Mike's reviews of the Release 11i and Release 12 architectures tend to be a bit overwhelming, but I agree with Mike that you really need to understand the architecture and where it came from to be able to support it as a DBA. And nobody ever said anything about the Oracle Applications was simple, particularly the underlying architecture.

Now, I have to admit, we had a little mishap on our first day. Mike's equipment had last been used by Release 12 instances, and it turns out that those instructions that you've heard time and time again about how you need to carefully review the Operating System Release Notes really are important - we had to de-install some operating system packages and install other versions to make the Release 11.5.10.2 install work. Who would have thought?

On Tuesday, we covered the admin utilities and autoconfig. We tried our hand at changing an autoconfig template, and we used admergepatch to merge some patches. Ah, admergepatch. If you don't know how to use this, you absolutely must learn. It really helps decrease upgrade time. We also started cloning our Release 11i instance. I took great comfort from the knowledge that Oracle's cloning scripts have improved tremendously over the years.

On Wednesday, we finished up our clone. Somehow I managed to mess up the permissions on mine, but eventually I got things pointed to where they were supposed to point. We also covered more architecture topics - this time on Release 12. We talked more about Apache, 10gAS and configuration, and we installed Release 12. Packing two installs and a clone into this class really gave us a workout.

On Thursday, we covered Release 12's OPMN. We didn't have enough time to do a Release 11i/Release 12 upgrade (Mike has a separate class for that), but Mike walked us through his notes, as he has done this upgrade many times. Then we moved on to failover, load balancing and parallel concurrent processing, three topics near and dear to Mike's heart. He did a terrific demo with three machines that showed how failover kicks in. Incidentally, you don't have to be a RAC user to take advantage of failover - Mike showed us how the concurrent manager could be set up to fail over to another server. He's done some very interesting research on the parameters that affect how quickly failover takes place. Mike also showed how failover behaves differently between Release 11i and Release 12. I considered that information to be a golden nugget for sure, because with Release 11i, you don't have to specify your failover server in your concurrent manager setup. You do with Release 12, so if you didn't know that, you might be in for a rude awakening!

On Friday we covered troubleshooting issues. We looked at some of the log files and Mike showed us where to find them and how to interpret them. We also covered how to change the APPS password, and finished up with a rousing presentation about security.

All in all, it was a great class. I highly recommend it, particularly if you're transitioning from being a DBA to being an Applications DBA. The amount of knowledge that you have to have to take on the Applications DBA role is daunting, and this hands on class really provides you with the necessary information to do that job well.

Next on my list? I think I'll take a whirl at the Release 11i to Release 12 Upgrade Class, but not until I've practiced my cloning and install skills a bit more.