Introduction to Toad for Oracle for DBAs - in-depth tutorial

In this presentation I want to talk about Toad for Oracle DBAs. And I want to demo Toad DBA suite covering three kind of key areas where we see DBAs and DBA teams are often challenged. One is the ability to efficiently and simplify routine maintenance tasks. Sort of tasks that DBAs perform on a daily basis, or weekly basis. Performance diagnostics and resolutions. So identify the root cause of a performance slowdown as quickly and effectively as possible. And discovering the root cause, and resolving the problem as quickly as possible to make-- to keep the business up and running. And then thirdly, we see that there are a lot of risks associated with planned changes in the database, and we want to try and help DBAs mitigate the risks of these planned changes. Which could come from database configuration changes, patches, upgrades, or even changes coming from development. I want to talk about the Toad Editions, which additions are available in Toad for DBAs. And then finally, where you can go to and find out more information about Toad specifically around database administration on Oracle. What I want to start off with in Toad is the Database Browser. The Database Browser is accessible from the main toolbar. There it is there. And this is a very good sort of alternative to using Schema Browser. And the reasons will become clear as I start expanding these out. So what you see on the left hand side are basically servers and databases. So effectively in one screen you can see all your server and databases split out with access to all the database objects, schema objects, and so forth without having multiple Schema Browsers open. I can click on the database. I can get an overview of that database in terms of STA usage, shared pool usage, percentage hit rates, event weights, and other metrics. I can also view information about the instance itself, the database, its option settings, any sessions that are currently open, what the top sessions are, rollback segment usage, space usage, data file I/O, etc. I can also get access to Schema objects. If I click on the Schema object node, then the right hand side actually gives me-- in fact the Schema Browser embedded inside the Database Browser window where I can change schema name, and I can change the update type. So if I select an object such as a table on the left hand side, I get the same tabs in the right hand side, as I would do had I been in Schema Browser. So the nice thing with the database browser is, it lets see all my servers and databases. And it keeps me in one place. I can use this like my console to drive all my activity. If I right click this particular database I want to manage, you can see also there are a number of popular tasks that I can perform directly from the Database Browser window. And one of those is the database health check. Now, the database health check is a reporting tool which lets you report on the whole range of various aspects of your database. The configuration, the performance, information that's in the alert log, stores information, schema information, production level information. If you are using RAC clusters there are a set of checks there specifically around RAC. There's a section called vulnerability assessment which looks at how exposed your database may be from attacks through Oracle user accounts. If you are running a database on a virtual machine, there are a number of checks there for that. And then finally, if you have any Exadata appliances in your organization, there are a number of checks, which check the configuration of your Exadata appliance. Then you can go ahead and run the health check against that database. There are a number of other checks for other databases already defined. Go ahead and run that check. You can see some interesting things actually appearing in the report. For example, there's-- under configuration there's a check for Oracle Enterprise Edition feature usage. And there are checks for usages of the tuning pack at the diagnostic pack. Because we feel that this is one of these things you need to be aware of. And there's also a separate reporting which reports the same information. Once this report is run, having configured it for that particular database, is you can persist the information by checking this button here. And this will save this Windows state with all its settings into an app, and you can give this a name. Lets call it health check, health check 99 because I think of some others there, and click OK. And then that's saved into the automation tool. And I can access those anytime I want to by selecting the rerun menu. And you see under the rerun menu, there's a health check right there with 122 checks on that particular database. As well as other things that I've saved as safe Windows states as well. So let's go into the task automation tool itself. This is called the automation designer. And in automation designer you'll see the health check window persisted state that I stated earlier on. And in fact if I right click this and look at its properties just to really prove that that's the check I ran for this database. And these are the checks I had previously selected to save that Windows state. If I expand these other items out, you see that this is part of a kind of an extended workflow that I've created here called DBA demo. And I can move this check into here. In fact there's another health check I've already created, so I can maybe remove this one here and have this one in its place. So these are a number of other checks I've got, and put them together into this workflow. There's even some conditional logic there.