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Oracle Best Practices
Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting |
January 2007
Following Oracle best practices is a critical
management goal for many reasons:
Performance best practices - Oracle best practices
for coding and PL/SQL best practices ensure optimal performance
and code maintainability. Dr.
Hall's book
Oracle PL/SQL Tuning
is a great source for PL/SQL best practices. Also
see Oracle tuning best
practices and
Oracle performance
monitoring best practices.
Contrary to an
Oracle "best practice", an Oracle Worst Practices are actions (or
non-actions) that cause poor performance and create excessive
management overhead, essentially a non-standard approach to Oracle
database management.
Areas of Oracle best practices
There are
many areas of Oracle best practices, covering architecture best
practices, DBA best practices and Oracle developer best
practices.
Oracle Best Practice: Instance
consolidation -
There are many
compelling benefits to having multiple instances on a large
scalable server (Oracle
instance consolidation), all part of the
second age
of mainframe computing:
Oracle Best Practice: Proper change
control - It
is a best practice to fully test all production changes,, first
in a TEST instance, and later in a QA instance, testing all
possible scenarios before going into production.
One
best practice to ensure optimal SQL execution in production is to provide an
adequate database for your developers. Remember, you can
export your production schema statistics to make your development
system look like production.
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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