Database Environment Assessment

An initial Database Environment Assessment provides Exadba with a comprehensive picture of your Oracle database environment. It provides you with key insights, observations and short- and long-term database recommendations.

Through this testing, we may identify key issues that may have an undesirable impact on ensuring that the Service-Level Agreement (SLA) is met.

Any corrective actions to solve these key issues will be documented and discussed with you as a part of the presentation with the findings and recommendations of this assessment. The actual assessment creates little strain on the database and the database machine. Therefore, these activities can be performed on a production database during normal operation.

All the information resulting from this Database Environment Assessment will be kept confidential.

This Database Environment Assessment is broken down by the following task based categories: Availability, Configuration, Installation, Licensing, Patching, Performance, Security and Upgrade.

Information is collected related to the following Oracle products (if applicable):

• Oracle Management Server and Intelligent Agent (Grid Server, Agent Server, DB Control) for Oracle grid control 11g and cloud control 12c.
• Oracle Networking products
• Oracle RAC Cluster (Single/Multiple Nodes, Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Cluster File System, Data Guard)
• Oracle RDBMS Server (Standard and Enterprise Editions)
• Oracle SQL*Plus/iSQL*Plus
• Oracle Exadata

Assessment Preparation

Exadba begins the assessment with a project kick-off meeting at the customer’s offices and comprises:

• Stakeholder identification.
• Collect general information about target infrastructure (databases, hosts and network connectivity).
• Collect information about used IT operational procedures, standards and guidelines.
• Establish timelines for Database Environment Assessment.
• Discuss any specific issues that are of concern to the customer.

Installation of Tools

• Record and prepare the infrastructure to be examined (Oracle database, hardware environment).
• Provide the description/scripts to make the measurements.
• Installation of Oracle RDA (Remote Diagnostics Agent) which provides a suite of data collection and diagnostic scripts that aid in analysis and support of Oracle products.
• Configuration and activation of the measurement environment with Oracle tool STATSPACK, AWR or ADDM, depending on the existing customer licenses.
• Installation of The EMDIAG REPVF and AGTVFY kit which is designed to collect data from a Grid Control Management Repository/Agent 10g or 11g or a DB Control Repository/Agent 10g or 11g to assist in the diagnosis and correction of Grid Control or DB Control issues. Measurement of Target Systems (also available for Cloud Control 12c Repository/Agent.

Our DBA(s) will gather data from the target environment(s) during our initial on-site visit. Depending on the amount of databases to be examined, further remote database access may be required into your environment, in order to complete the assessment. This all of course in compliance with your security policies.

Analysis of Data and Customer Reporting

Analysis of the Database Environment Assessment reports created during the measurements.

The measurements produce results that are one of the following:

• Validated (no actions)
• Recommended actions
• Required actions (key issues)

You will receive a comprehensive report detailing all measurements performed as well as a summary of the possible recommendations and required actions (key issues). We will deliver both a printed version and an electronic version.

During a second on-site visit we will present the findings of the report you received and discuss the recommendations given.