Spring Cleaning Time - For Oracle DBAs
It is that time of year! It is a bit warmer. The days are a little bit longer. And two cups of coffee is not always a 100% requirement to be pleasant in the early morning.
For Oracle DBAs, especially after a busy PROD season, now is a good time to review the goals for 2015 in the DB environment, and come up with a plan, to at least, do some Spring clean-up in the near time. But where to start?
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Review Oracle 12c and its new features, and discuss with systems and App managers when you should plan for a 12c upgrade in all of PROD
- Review your current Disaster Recovery (we call it 'avoidance') plan, plan meetings to update it and test it. If you do not have a DR plan right now, then make this Job #1
- Review your Backup/Recovery plans, and verify you are verifying the jobs. logs, and clone/refresh tasks (an important part of your DR plan)
- If you are using Enterprise Manager now, then review the EM 12c Release 4 features, and seriously consider moving to EM 12c R4 soon. If you are not now using EM at all, make this Job #2
- Look for training opportunities to enhance your skills and the skills of your team. Options include formal 3 to 5 day offsite classes, to books and videos, to Oracle User Group meetings. And there are tons, and tons of on-the-web resources, but BE CAREFUL of the source and never make any drastic change to PROD without careful review
Most of all - we can all get bogged down into day-to-day work, so much that we feel we do not have a moment to do anything but the task work in front of us. But if we do not take time to review our environment, and its SOPs, we will get into a "tech rut" and miss opportunities to do things better, faster, and with an eye towards incremental improvement everywhere.
And get outside a take a walk or something too (smile).
For a 20,000ft review of your Oracle DB environment, contact us at OMC.