Database administrators are typically swamped with simultaneous numerous jobs. They have to keep their database platforms up to date and working smoothly. That requires manual effort to perform certain tasks on a regular basis, sometimes daily or hourly.
This can be more complicated when the same task needs to be done across multiple database platforms.
DBTA recently held a webinar with Bert Scalzo, senior product manager at IDERA, who demonstrated ways to automate tedious and often time-consuming, but very necessary, DBA tasks.
According to Scalzo, the benefits of automating tasks include:
- Increased throughput or productivity
- Improved quality or increased predictability of quality
- Improved robustness (consistency), of processes or product
- Increased consistency of output or results
- Frees up workers to take on other roles
- Provides higher level jobs in the development, deployment, maintenance and running of the automated processes
Scalzo recommends automating with Oracle’s free Orachk utility because it will notify DBAs immediately of any changes within the system.
Automating trace and log file cleanup will help DBAs be able to keep the number of trace files and the size of the alert log both reasonable, making navigating those directories and files far easier. Having the files organized by day can often help investigations as well by providing phone book-like indexing of the hordes of files.
Other examples of DBA task automation:
- Automate Database Health Check
- Automate Trace File Cleanup
- Automate ALERT Log File Cleanup
- Automate Data Dictionary Statistics
- Automate Database Configuration Check
- Automate Database Schema Object check
- Automate Routine Daily Tasks using GUI Tools
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.