Oracle Best Practices

Oracle Best Practice:  Enough testing instances - Many Oracle shops keep fours environments, DEV for development, TEST for unit testing, QA for pre-production testing, and PROD for production.  Any less Oracle testing and you may risk unintended side effects.

Oracle Best Practice:  Performance tracking - With STATSPACK (free) and AWR in Oracle10g, there is no excuse for not tracking your database performance.  STATSPACK and AWR provide a great historical performance record and set the foundation for DBA predictive modeling.  See my book Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference for details on Oracle monitoring best practices.

Oracle Best Practice:  Security management infrastructure- Oracle offers a host of access control mechanisms (grants, roles, VPD) yet it is amazing how many shops have giant security holes. See the book "Oracle Privacy Security Auditing" for Oracle security best practices.

Oracle Best Practice:  Standardized external environments - This is the worst of worst practices where every database uses different shells, different aliases and  non-standard file locations. 

Oracle best practice - audit changes to initialization parameters.  Tracking & auditing changes to your init.ora parameters

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Rampant author Brian Peasland offers these Oracle best practices:

• Maintain your database on current releases. Today that means you should be on either 11.2.0.4 or 12.1.0.2. If the former, you should already have a plan in place to get to 12.1.0.2 before free extended support for 11.2.0.4 expires early next year.  Too many DBAs let their version lag behind for a variety of reasons. They later find upgrades are more painful than if they had remained current. Plus they often end up engineering solutions that the new version provides as a new feature.

If you're on 12c, you could probably add lots of new features that can make your life easier.

• Start using Unified Auditing.
• Use IDENTITY columns or sequence NEXTVAL as default column values to populate that synthetic key column much faster than the old trigger selecting NEXTVAL.
• In Memory columnstore.
  
• Get the Diagnostics Pack and Tuning Pack for your environments. They are not cheap but they sure do make your life a lot easier. Many people who won't buy these because of the cost do not realize the they end up paying for themselves in about two years (your mileage may vary).
  
• Learn how to create a testbed with Virtual Box on your workstation or laptop. There is no excuse any more for not having a testbed at your disposal. Even in many corporate environments with private cloud (or similar) implementations and Oracle VM or VMWare dominating in the enterprise, it may not be easy to standup an Oracle database just for a small proof-of-concept project. Too many times, it becomes political infighting within the IT department. But if you do this on your workstation, you'll be off and running and have total control of your testbed.
  
• Get involved with social media. Follow blogs of Oracle experts, follow them on Twitter. Participate in the OTN and/or MOSC communities. There will be no better way to grow your career then when you are interacting with other Oracle professionals on a daily basis.
  
• Learn another database system. When I started this career, it typically meant another RDBMS like SQL Server, DB2, etc. Now, it can also mean MongoDB, Hadoop, and others that are not relational in nature.  When learning these other systems, try to figure out how each is different an how each is the same. This will help solidify your overall database knowledge. For example, from a database theory perspective, we know that relational databases generate transaction logs. But how each does it differs.
  
• If you're still using SQL*Plus daily, take a look at SQL Developer and how much of a timesaver it can be. And get a copy of SQLcl as well. SQL*Plus is still great and should still be in the DBAs arsenal though.

These are just a few of the top Oracle best practices.