The Triora Group

Do you get a kick out of Oracle? I, for one, enjoy Oracle because there is always so much to learn. And, although no one can know everything, Oracle certainly provides a wealth of learning opportunities. If you are reading this, then you are most likely involved with the Oracle E-Business Suite. You may be functional or you may be technical, but most of all you should be inquisitive.

My first priority after joining Triora Group was to get some servers to get our research lab off the ground. I then needed to install Oracle, including Release 11i and Release 12 of the E-Business Suite, as well as RAC, Oracle’s Grid Control (OEM) with AMP, and a few other pieces of software necessary to support the “typical” Oracle E-Business environment.

The laundry list of installs kept growing as I sat down and thought about all the areas we covered as a company along with what technologies we needed to be familiar with as field consultants. As an Applications DBA, I was really looking forward to getting the installs done so that I could start investigating. I don’t know about you, but everyday I seem to end up with a “hmmm, I wonder what that is really doing…” question. So, how do you work through these types of issues?

One instance every organization should have is a DBA instance. This instance is where your DBAs can investigate to destruction. This is your “hmmm, I wonder what that is really doing…” instance. This instance also serves as the first stop for any patching intended for production, as well as any DBA-sponsored changes for production. But what I’ve just described is the normal use for this instance, rather than the cool use, so let’s get back to the cool stuff.

Now that you have an instance in which to play, make sure you play. There are hundreds of helpful scripts out there that need to be explored before they can be used. And now you have an instance to try them on. There are also hundreds of useful blogs sharing a wealth of information. Pick one and work on testing their assertions. Perhaps you want to test an Oracle process. What are all the files touched when Autoconfig runs? Maybe performance is something that you want to test. How much memory does does a concurrent process consume? What about a background process? These are all things that can be investigated in your DBA instance.

The power of being a good technologist is in your ability to learn. It is in your inquisitive nature. Recently, I was sitting in a hotel lounge (!) working with a colleague, and as we discussed the various entries of an XML file we started to wonder… If it is normal for people to comment out a line they don’t want to be read in a shell script or a .conf file, can you comment out a line in the XML file? Will Autoconfig read it anyway? My guess is that it would be read despite the leading pound (#) sign. However, I am not 100% sure. So, what should I do? As soon as I get my work done for the weekend, I guess I’ll test it on my DBA instance and see for myself what happens.

I was lucky in my early years as a DBA to have found the Oak Table Network and folks like Cary Millsap, Tom Kyte, Jonathan Lewis and Craig Shallahamer. These guys were as good as they come and were willing to share their knowledge. The best part of finding their websites was that they believed in showing their work. This allowed me to follow their notes and test their assertions on my own. Where did I test? Again, I was lucky to have a test instance. This instance was a company instance but was later removed for space considerations, so I installed it at home to continue my education.

I spend a lot of time reading books about Oracle, whitepapers, industry presentations, and blogs to see what others are working on and what they have learned. Our Oracle community has some very smart people that are also very willing to share. In future newsletters I’ll highlight some of these sources so that we can all learn together. I’ll be learning in my instances – where will you be learning?

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