Month: March 2013

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Once upon a time there was a prince2 and a production frog from an Oracle Dba perspective

Introduction.

A lot of  us have to do both projects and  day – to – day business.  What really sometimes is a sad thing happening is the mere fact that project seem to have no wider horizon then the end  of project .. It seems that the project deliverable  project -end-date is the only sacred time line..   Also not all too uncommon is the Database might be already offered to the customer before ALL  Q&A steps have finished by project managers.  So sometimes a prince might turn into a production frog  if you look at it from a production administrator perspective in the end.

Personally as an Oracle Database Administrator  I think  improving working together with Project manages should have two needs for improvement:

  1. Project managers need to be  made more aware of the Post go live situation if the implementation is only targeting a  go-live-date.
  2. Project manages should never ever ( did i mention ever) be allowed to  have customers entering the systems before go-live ( simply cause they might claim live status once they are hooked up to the database)

Hm and I have a dream I know it is wishful thinking but sometimes I  really think  it would be great to have Project people with a more technical background , maybe even with a  base training about  standards,  production  rules of other departments like Oracle ..

🙂 and for the Admins ..  Make sure you get involved in projects as early as possible and make sure , standards are followed.. or if you are in production side and a  Databases administrator is part  the project team make sure that he – she  is aware of your production world and   your standards.

Taking a first look at Prince2 if you care..:

http://www.prince2.com/prince2-process-model.asp

Happy reading

Mathijs

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Alert log shows Private strand flush not complete

Introduction

Recently came across the following issue that a database is throwing  this message : Private strand flush not complete  during the switch of the redo logfile group. It is interesting to see the various opinions on this matter on the web, and in Mos. That is why i think taking inventory   and a plan might still be useful.

Details:

Database at hand is a 10.2.3.0 EE. on a Solaris box.

Looking under the hood i see:

SQL> select GROUP#,THREAD#,bytes/1024/1024 MB,members, STATUS from v$log order by 2,1 ;
GROUP#    THREAD#         MB    MEMBERS STATUS
 ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------------
 1          1       2000          2 INACTIVE
 2          1       2000          2 INACTIVE
 3          1       2000          2 CURRENT
 4          1       2000          2 INACTIVE
 5          1       2000          2 INACTIVE

Database is 1.24 TB

and looking at:

show parameter db_writer_processes
NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
 ------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------
 db_writer_processes                  integer     2
Switches per hour:
Date            Switches
 ------------- ----------
 2013-03-13 02          8
 2013-03-13 03          7
 2013-03-13 04          3
 2013-03-13 05         13
 2013-03-13 06          9
 2013-03-13 07          2
 2013-03-13 08          2
 2013-03-13 09          9
 2013-03-13 10          1

According to MOS note Alert Log Messages: Private Strand Flush Not Complete [ID 372557.1] i should/could consider increasing the  db_writer_processes  at least from the current 2 to  4..  Which  sounds like a plan 2 Me.

Happy reading.

Mathijs