What does a DBA do all day?

Responsibilities include installing, configuring, and managing the database, and these responsibilities can be divided into tasks scheduled to occur at certain intervals. This is a generalized list and, depending on your environment, may or may not be applicable. Most of the outlined tasks will be investigated further in later chapters in the book.

Monitoring and Log Rotation tasks can be done with Enterprise Manager, Grid Control, Unix shell scripting, DBMS_Scheduler, Perl, third-party database tools, or a combination of any of these.

Prioritizing tasks—daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly

Let's run through the priority tasks you need to cover. Scheduling will depend on your environment, application needs, and overall job priorities.

Daily

• Backups—these are usually incremental or cumulative, weekly fulls, and logs are archived and e-mailed to DBA upon failure

• Database Alert Logs—such as ORA-errors, automatic notifications through e-mail, pagers

• ADRCI—Automatic Repository Utility and Log Rotation

• Operating System File space, CPU and I/O statistics—depends on system admin support

• SQL Tuning Sets—Top 5 to 10 SQL statements

• Corruption—RMAN logs, export and/or datapump logs, dbverify, v$database_block_corruption

• Tablespace growth—Extension, Partition Management, Temporary Tablespace, Undo

• Data Guard—Log Shipping/Application in Synch

• SQL*NET Listener Logs—intrusion detection

• Audit trails and logs—intrusion detection, removal of unused accounts

• Core Dumps and User Dumps—file space, Oracle bugs

• New account creation—should be at least partially automated

• Personnel security changes—At least 24 hours notice

• Migrate schema and code changes or ad hoc SQL updates

• Large table growth, coalescing tablespace

• Keeping a log of daily changes to the database—publishing it for certain IT staff

Weekly

• Backups—usually full

• Cloning for non-production databases—automated or scripted

• Tablespace growth—daily rolled up to weekly

• Oracle upgrade or patch set Migration Projects—Milestone updates

• Data Guard site testing

• Check for updates from My Oracle Support—new patches, updates, or news releases

• Local Intranet updates on operational procedures

Monthly

• Cloning for non-production databases—automated or scripted

• Monitoring tablespace growth—weekly rolled up to monthly

• Trends and forecasts—CPU utilization, I/O stats, logons

• Password changes on production—sys, system, wallet, schema, grid control, OAS

• Oracle licensing usage and high water marks

• Practicing recovery scenarios

Quarterly

• Applying CPUs and PSUs into production with planned downtime. Applying CPUs, PSUs, one-offs into non-production instances

• Monitoring tablespace growth—monthly rolled up to yearly

• Oracle training updates—Oracle University (online or in-class), books, informal meetings

• Trends and forecast rollups

Yearly

• Tablespace growth—yearly report

• Trends and forecast rollups

• Attend Oracle-oriented conferences—regional or national Oracle user groups

• Oracle upgrades with planned downtime—version + patch sets + PSUs + one-offs

• Software licensing and warranty renewals

• Hardware evaluation and replacement

• SSL Certificate renewals, Oracle Wallets

Yes, these look like a daunting number of tasks that need to be accomplished, but you will have help in the form of tools such as OEM, Grid Control, third-party monitoring, or home-grown scripts. That is why I will reiterate that automating these tasks is of paramount importance.