Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

Let’s continue our discussion on debugging 10G Enterprise Manager agent to management server communications. My last blog covered some of Giant Eagle’s experiences with agent administration and troubleshooting. But the management agents are only one piece of the puzzle; the problem could also be on the management server. As a result, when debugging communication failures we must also spend some time reviewing diagnostic information generated by the 10G Grid Control management server environment.

As we continue down our path of 10G Grid Control enlightenment, I thought it might be advantageous to deviate from our discussions on the advisors for yet another blog. Keeping the communications flowing between the agents and the management console can be somewhat tricky at times. I will admit that most of our issues were “self inflicted”. If you are like us, you’ll have to learn how to troubleshoot a problem or two until you gain experience.

We have been installing and administering the 10G agents for some time now and we think we have crested the top of the learning curve. Once you gain experience, the environment pretty works as advertised. I thought I would give you a few helpful facts on how to administer the agents and also provide you with some information on how we solved some of the problems we have encountered. In an upcoming blog I’ll describe how to troubleshoot the management server.

We were in the process of discussing 10G Grid Control’s Segment Analyzer before being interrupted by a one terabyte table that I discussed in the last blog. In this blog, I’ll get back on track by reviewing the different alternatives we can use to reclaim wasted space in Oracle10G.

Since the Segment Analyzer and online shrink command were introduced in Oracle10G, I’ll spend a few minutes discussing how you can identify and shrink objects in pre-10G releases.

Consider this to be yet another “Stop the Presses Blog”. I originally intended to discuss the different toolsets that DBAs can use to reclaim unused space allocated to Oracle objects. This installment was to be the follow-up to my previous blog on the Segment Analyzer. But we have hit an important milestone here at Giant Eagle, so I thought I would deviate from my intended topic for one blog.

If you have been following this series, you’ll know that my unit is responsible for administering several large data warehouses. The warehouse that we most recently converted to 10G has a single, partitoned table that has just grown to one terabyte in size. The entire database is multiple terabytes and rapidly growing at hundreds (and hundreds) of MEGs per month. We estimate that within 2 years, the database will be close to 10 terabytes in size. I thought it might be interesting to interview our “big data” DBA, Jim Dojonovic. Jim is responsible for administering our data warehouses.