I've been trapped on Oracle 9.2.0.8 for years now and finally there is
talk of upgrading to 11g. So, I've tried to get onto some courses,
however, there are none in my city. So my boss wants me to do a live
virtual course. Has anyone done any of these courses and if so do you
recommend them? Or would it be much better value to fly some where
that has the courses on?

I've been doing Oracle DB work for about 10 years and was thinking
that the courses that would be most useful would be Oracle Admin II,
Data Guard and Enterprise Manager. Although, I currently use Korn
shell scripts for all of my admin on HP-UX boxes.

I realise that these are very general questions so I'm only after very
general answers. I personally think I might be better off just setting
up Data Guard, EM and the DBs on my two Linux test boxes and learn by
getting my hands dirty.

How useful is EM these days?

On Jan 9, 4:38*pm, DG problem <skatef... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Been way too long since I've had any courses, so I can't comment on
them. There is enough new stuff, particularly the cbo plan stuff, it
surely is worthwhile to get your hands dirty.

I'm on hp-ux, and I find EM pretty useful, as long as you don't
completely depend on it, which can certainly be your case with all
your existing experience and scripts. In fact, I use it to run
backups, and (in 10gR2) have had a couple of cases where dbconsole has
completely self-immolated, and my bacon was saved by having the old
scripts around while support takes days to figure out that hp-ux
really is different than linux and some basic perl scripts delivered
simply don't work right. I've found some visualization really
helpful, such as being able to see what is in tablespaces and the
basic performance screens (you have to pay for the option - I think it
is worth it, though you might check s-ash), and the advisors. Quickly
grabbing some existing DDL is so much easier than the stored procedure
syntax (though I still keep tablespace creation scripts, they're handy
for my situation), and having the sql id of problem sql right there in
front of you is so helpful. I'm using the term EM interchangeably
with dbconsole, I'm not using grid.

I still stick with cron though for most stuff, I may be the minority
opinion about that. I've seen bizarre performance issues looking at
some dbconsole batch logs, don't know if that's version specific or
what.

I really don't use a lot of the features. I have a very sour view of
the stuff sending database information out to the net, so I've turned
that off, but that may just be me. At times I've seen tx locks that
indicate some fundamental coding flaws, often following some unusually
high load on the db.

When you do patching, be careful about checking that everything is
indeed shutdown when it should be, some of the java on hp-ux seems a
bit mulish about letting go of processes. hp-ux is, of course, the
red-headed stepchild of Oracle platforms these days. When dbconsole
has gone down in flames, I have a much worse opinion of it, but
eventually it all gets sorted out, it's just basic crappy open source
you can slog through while support gives you wrong procedures to fix
it.

I don't even remember OEM anymore.

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...complaint.html

On Jan 9, 7:38*pm, DG problem <skatef... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
I have taken an Oracle self-paced online course and it was OK. Oracle
offers actual online class style training also. I have never tried
one of those.

I think reading the actual 11.2 Concepts, DBA Admin, and Installation
Manual plus those manuals for any special features you plan to use
such as Data Guard would be the place to start.

HTH -- Mark D Powell --

On Jan 13, 5:12*am, Mark D Powell <Mark.Powe... (AT) hp (DOT) com> wrote:

Thanks for the input guys as is supports what I already thought.