Giant Eagle's warehouse development team has also been busy putting Oracle10G through its paces. We have spent a lot of time learning how to administer Oracle's latest and greatest release, so let's now turn our attention to what Giant Eagle's application developers have been up to. In this blog, we'll review the results of our application testing and compare some batch and on-line execution times from our 9I data warehouse to its 10G counterpart.

I'll begin part 2 of my series on RMAN by discussing a few of the 10G enhancements that we are interested in. I'll finish this series with our 10G RMAN test plan. Considering that we will be using this new release of RMAN to back up and recover our multiple terabyte data warehouses, I won't rest easy until I know I have tested every command that we use here at Giant Eagle.

Call me paranoid but I will never, ever, ever trust any tool with my career. The test plan included in this blog may seem like overkill to you, but if it reduces my personal anxiety and lowers my (and my unit's) stress during our next recovery, the time spent testing RMAN will be well worth it. The more stressed you are during a recovery, the greater the chance you will have of making mistakes. Recoveries are stressful enough. I don't want to be wondering if the tool is going to work.

Recovering an Oracle database is a wonderfully complex task. Data files, log files, control files, full backups, hot backups and point-in-time recoveries all combine to make many administrators lie awake nights wondering if their databases can be easily recovered. Oracle10G contains numerous enhancments to the RMAN backup utility. As a result, a thorough testing of 10G RMAN is warranted.

In part 1 of this 2 part series, I'll provide you with a few backup and recovery tips, tricks and techniques that I think will help both beginners and experts alike. Since we are RMAN aficionados here at Giant Eagle, I'll finish the blog with an introduction to RMAN. In part 2, I'll highlight a few of the 10G RMAN new features we are interested in and provide you with Giant Eagle's detailed 10G RMAN test plan.

After spending 20 hours testing Enterprise Manager, I'm happy to report that everything works as advertised. The tool is rock-solid. I thought for sure the product would have at least a few problems that I could report on. So instead of a bug discussion, this blog contains some of the tips and tricks I learned during the execution of my Enterprise Manager test plan.

This is the first release of Oracle that has forced me to spend more time learning how to use the tool to administer the database than I have spent testing the new features the database provides. Now that our 10G OEM testing is finally complete, I'll provide you with two blogs in quick succession. In this first blog, I'll provide you with a high-level over of what we found during our installation and in-depth testing. In the second I'll finish my discussion on OEM with a bulleted list of notes that I compiled during my 20 hours of putting 10G OEM through its paces.

We have been testing Oracle10G for some time now. So, I thought I'd spend 5 minutes giving you a quick update on a few new features we are interested in.

We now have several 10G analysis projects underway. I thought I’d give you a quick update on our accomplishments (or lack thereof) on one of them. This will hopefully prevent others from experiencing the same issues that we just have.

Even with all of the high-tech bells and whistles that 10G offers, the database is useless to us if we can't administer it effectively. For years now, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) has been the sissy GUI administrative tool of choice for Oracle databases. Oracle10G's OEM is radically different than previous versions. In this blog, I'll provide you with a high level overview of Oracle10G OEM and Giant Eagle's OEM testing plan.

Let's take a quick look at our first 10G data warehouse database. Well begin by reviewing some basic reports that describe the general database environment and database structures. As a gift from your friendly ex-Oracle instructor, I'll also provide you with the scripts that generated them. I'll finish the blog with an overview of our Oracle10G testing strategies.

In Part 2 of our series on upgrading databases to 10G, we review the different upgrade mechanisms available to us: Export/Import, manual upgrade, data copy and the Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA). I'll finish by providing you with some hints and tips that will help you choose the most appropriate upgrade method for your environment.