Oracle Scripts: Powerful Tools for DBAs and Developers

This book provides a powerful set of tools for Oracle database administrators and developers. During their many years of administering, tuning, and troubleshooting Oracle databases, the authors have developed hundreds of useful scripts. Now you can instantly take advantage of their experience by putting these scripts to work at your own site. DBAs and developers are constantly reinventing the wheel. Most Oracle sites have similar requirements, problems, and crises, and at most of these sites DBAs and developers find themselves reinventing the wheel by writing the same kinds of scripts -- and too often they're writing them under pressure, in hit-or-miss and error-prone fashion. The scripts in this book are tried-and-true. They've been thoroughly tested in many different environments. You can use them right now to simplify the tasks you perform each day -- monitoring databases for reliability, protecting your database against data loss, improving performance, increasing security, and building reports that provide insight into the inner workings of Oracle databases. You can also turn to these scripts in emergencies to diagnose system problems and repair databases when the pressure is on. The book includes:

• Scripts for DBAs -- The ways that DBAs structure files, allocate disk space, tune systems, and enforce security have an enormous impact on how efficiently and effectively systems will operate. The scripts in this category analyze performance, check database reliability, produce security and auditing reports, perform backups and restores, and work with the Oracle Applications.
• Scripts for developers and designers -- These scripts help to create, analyze, report, and reverse-engineer the objects in the database. They also allow developers to easily create EXPLAIN PLAN reports on SQL statements, and they provide a front end to RCS (the Revision Control System).
• Utility scripts -- These scripts perform a variety of operating system, file, directory, and memory operations (aimed particularly at UNIX sites). You can customize these scripts for your own operating system. The accompanying CD-ROM provides a comprehensive resource for DBAs and developers. It contains complete source code for all of the scripts described in this book, as well as additional software that you will find helpful in monitoring and improving the performance of your databases.

A brief table of contents follows: Part I: Overview

• Introduction

Part II: Scripts for DBAs

• Database Control Utilities
• Database Performance and Trend Analysis Utilities
• Database Reliability Monitoring Utilities
• Database Security Reports and Utilities
• Database Backup Utilities
• Oracle Applications Utilities

Part III. Scripts for Developers and Designers

• Database-Design/DDL Utilities
• Database Developer Utilities

IV: UNIX Utility Scripts

• General System Utilities
• Directory and File Management Utilities
• Memory Usage Reports

Part V. Appendixes

• A. SQL Scripts That Create Oracle Tables
• B. Tables Created by SQL Scripts
• C. SQL Scripts That Create Output Files
• D. Output Files Created by SQL Scripts

Brian Lomasky is a senior principal consultant with Oracle Corporation Consulting Services. He specializes in Oracle database and UNIX/OpenVMS/WinNT operating system tuning, troubleshooting, configuration, backup and recovery, and database auditing. When he isn't busy creating new scripts to solve day-to-day problems for DBAs, he has been a featured speaker at the national IOUG-A and Oracle OpenWorld conferences, as well as at local user groups.