Oracle Technical Architecture for Systems Engineers Training Course

A three day on-site Oracle Technical Architecture, best practices & tuning class
© 2007-2009 by Burleson Consulting

This course is taught at your Company site with up to 20 students.  Click here for on-site course prices Optional supplemental mentoring

* Learn the history & evolution of Oracle database management and Understand the Oracle "culture". * Learn how to deploy high performance storage management devices with Oracle. * See how very large Oracle shops manage storage and server resources. * See how replication addresses the problem of growing workloads. * Understand Oracle replication and disaster recovery approaches. * Understand optimal Oracle configuration for high performance. * Learn Oracle best practices for Oracle configuration and management. * See when and how to apply solid-state disk to Oracle storage architectures. * See proven techniques for monitoring I/O throughput and finding bottlenecks. * Understand how to verify I/O bottlenecks and predict throughout improvements from high speed solutions. * Understand the common causes of performance problems and see how data caching improves access speed. * Understand proven techniques for Oracle health checks. * Get a management-level overview of Oracle Technical Architecture, Performance Tuning and Oracle best practices.		This course is designed for practicing Systems Engineers with basic familiarity with database management who seek to understand Oracle technical history and evolution, Oracle technical architecture, Oracle performance tuning concepts and Oracle best practices. All Systems Engineers are challenged to understand the Oracle technical architecture and understand how to employ Oracle best practices for configuration and management of very large Oracle databases. Further, Oracle SE's must be able to quickly and accurately interact with Oracle technical support personnel for problem resolution and patch application. All Oracle databases are I/O intensive and the goal of Oracle tuning is to retrieve the required data with a minimum of disk access.  For the SE, this involves understanding the interface between the database software and the operating system and seeing how to monitor Oracle for transient disk I/O bottlenecks.   Oracle Disk I/O Tuning     ISBN: 0974599344 Oracle RAC & Grid tuning with solid state disk      ISBN: 0976157357 Oracle Silver Bullets     ISBN: 0975913522   This course is designed for Systems Engineers and Systems Administrations who are challenged to help manage Oracle systems in very large and high workload environments. The course assumes a basic knowledge of database management and administration, relational database concepts, and basic disk storage architecture.

This Technical Architecture training was designed by Donald K. Burleson.  Author of more than 30 database books, Burleson was chosen by Oracle Press to write five authorized editions, including three Oracle Tuning books. Burleson has extensive Oracle tuning experience and wrote the book "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference".

Oracle Technical Architecture for Systems Engineers
Training Course

This section will teach students about external influences on Oracle performance, how to measure them, and how to ensure that the external environment is properly configured for Oracle. Students will learn how to take advantage of all the UNIX-based tools for monitoring, configuring, and tuning the external environment. The course also covers tuning issues related to the operating system, tuning for effective CPU usage, reorganizing tables to improve I/O performance and more.

3 - Monitoring server resource bottlenecks

This section will focus on identifying and correcting external influences including RAM memory shortages, disk I/O bottlenecks, and CPU shortages.  The external environment will be monitored using the vmstat and iostat utilities.  This section will discuss the iterations of recommendations relating to environmental tuning such as OS dispatching priorities, swap space allocation, and other OS-specific issues. 

• vmstat utility – Interpreting the runqueue, page-in and the CPU metrics.

• iostat utility – Using the iostat utility to determine disk I/O access patterns and I/O bottlenecks.

This section will explore Oracle replication with RAC and Streams and explain the ramifications of replication versus database links for distributed data, failover, workload balancing and disaster recovery.

• Data Buffer management - Buffer management issues will include the performance of Oracle with various values of db_block_size and the proper settings for db_block_buffers.  This section will also look at allocation of the DEFAULT, KEEP and RECYCLE pools.
   

• Shared pool issues – This section will discuss the management of the components of the shared pool with a focus on the management of activity in the library cache.
   

• Sorting issues – This section will describe the management of the sort_area_size parameter and how to determine the optimal setting for disk versus memory sorting.

This section will introduce the Oracle data repository (STATSPACK & AWR), and show commonly-used scripts for locating bottlenecks.  This section will also introduce the TMS utility www.statspackanalyzer.com and show how to interpret monitoring results.

This section show how to identify repeating performance trends and how to apply just-in-time resources for impending bottlenecks.

This section will introduce a number of scripts specifically geared toward to locating transient I/O bottlenecks with a focus on interpreting the script results.

All Oracle databases become sub-optimal as a function of usage and this section covers the highlights of an Oracle health check, what is checked, and why it's important to overall database management.

This will teach the SE to present an encapsulation of the course concepts for presentation to senior IT management.  The emphasis will be on drawing analogies and illustration for an "in a nutshell" overview of Oracle technical architecture, performance tuning, monitoring and best practices.