Oracle Database Go-Live Check List

Items to review before production go-live of an Oracle database system.

+) Security
accounts (check users with roles: DBA, import any, ...)
listener password
(if non-DBAs can log on to DB machine) check file Oracle directory and permissions
check for default DB accounts that can be locked or have the passwords changed
change OS passwords
change at least DB system password

+) Automate instance/listener start and stop with the operating system startup "rc" scripts.

+) Backup/recovery
verify archive log mode is on
verify rman jobs are scheduled and running correctly
in case backup system is down, ensure a couple days of disk space for archive_log_dest
export schema rows=n weekly or monthly
depending on requirements and performance considerations, enable db_block checksum

+) Performance
configure resource governor to guide CPU usage and parallel query usage
configure resource governor to limit undo usage by non-application owner accounts
schedule statspack snap every twenty or thirty minutes
enable monitoring on application tables
schedule dbms_stats.gather_schema_stats to gather stale (usually weekly or monthly)
use dbms_stats to create and export a statistics table (useful to quickly restore older version of statistics)

+) Checks
tablespace that will not be able to grow
undo tablespace growth is capped at less than the size of the file system
alert log error messages
users with default tablespace of system
operating system error log "syslog"
network error (netstat -i)

+) Multiple temp tablespaces
one tablespace that is only available to application owner
other tablespaces to segregate other users from interfering with application temp usage

Disk Usage By User

In shared unix filesystems, like /tmp, it is often useful to find who is using the most disk space.

While

du -sk *

will find large files,

find . -user mc -type f -exec du -k {} \; | awk '{ s = s+$1 } END { print "Total used: ",s }'

will show which user is consuming the most space.

IBM has an article describing this combination of find, du, and awk.

Locating Perl Modules

If perl modules are installed and perl is complaining of not being able to find the modules, try one of these:


1) create environment PERL5LIB, which works similar to the PATH environment variable


2) in the perl code, add:

BEGIN {unshift @INC, "/home/user/perl/modules/lib"};

3) in the perl code, add:

use lib '/home/user/perl/modules/lib';