by Buda Consulting | Jun 6, 2023 | Performance Tuning
Oracle databases are the beating heart of many companies, supporting mission-critical online transactions and analytics. Monitoring Oracle database health and proactively identifying bottlenecks can help avoid slow or unresponsive applications that impact users’ productivity and could affect sales, revenue, and brand image.
Why is Oracle database performance tuning important?
Keeping data flowing and users happy is what Oracle database performance tuning is all about. It’s a vital step in optimizing your overall database system to ensure application responsiveness, quick data retrieval, and high availability. The overall goal is to accelerate SQL query response times so that users can more efficiently access, manipulate, and modify data contained in the database.
Oracle offers many supportive tools to help optimize database performance. Even so, Oracle database performance tuning and troubleshooting remains a critical element in eliminating performance issues across various workloads. Database administrators (DBAs) need to proactively eliminate common performance roadblocks through ongoing monitoring, diagnostics, and maintenance.
What happens if you don’t proactively address Oracle database tuning on a routine basis? You end up with slow, inefficient application performance or even unavailable services caused by avoidable factors like inefficient database queries, improper indexing, and poor memory utilization.
Why is Oracle database performance tuning a challenge?
Oracle database performance tuning takes significant skill and experience. Many factors can influence database performance issues. When users report poor application response times, what is the root cause? Is it the way SQL queries are coded? Is the physical server running out of memory?
It can be hard to know where to start. But checking system-level parameters first is usually advisable, as other tuning steps won’t help much if CPU or disk utilization is the problem. Another recommended early step is analyzing Oracle Optimizer settings and statistics. The Optimizer does its best to decide the most efficient execution plan for queries, but it is not perfect.
A best practice is to establish a performance baseline from historical data. You can see variations and issues more easily when you have context for how metrics are changing. Some baseline statistics to gather include application transaction and response time data, as well as utilization and performance statistics for the virtual operating system, network, and storage. Of course, database performance and utilization statistics are key as well.
What steps are required for Oracle database performance tuning?
Oracle database tuning involves an open-ended set of activities that DBAs perform across both hardware and software to improve database performance from multiple angles. Some common performance-tuning steps include improving indexing, optimizing query efficiency, clustering database servers for better performance and availability, reconfiguring system parameters, and more.
For example, DBAs can find ways to improve Oracle database performance by examining CPU, memory, and disk metrics on the physical servers running your virtualized database workloads. Faster CPUs, more physical memory, and more available disk space will often improve database performance. If you’re seeing overload warning signs like lots of page faults per second, that indicates a chronic out-of-memory condition that will slow query responses.
Another factor to analyze with Oracle database performance tuning is connection pooling. You need to ensure that an application’s database connection is sized appropriately, especially as usage increases. The more connections to a database open and close, the more computing resources are required. Database connection pooling is a technique to reduce the load on the CPU by passing open connections between database operations, instead of closing them and opening new ones. The degree to which connection pooling can help increase database performance depends on multiple factors, such as network latency and database utilization. Considerable fine-tuning may be required to arrive at the ideal connection sizing.
Many DBAs also include data defragmentation as part of their Oracle database performance tuning efforts. Grouping associated data elements together accelerates disk input/output operations so queries can execute faster.
And no Oracle database performance tuning effort would be completely examining the SQL statements that retrieve data. The way SQL queries are written can have a huge impact on database performance. The more an SQL statement is called, the more tuning it can help if it is performing poorly.
What’s next?
If your business would benefit from improved Oracle database performance, reliability, and scalability, Buda Consulting has expert DBAs and a proven approach that can help. Contact us for a free “database discussion” to explore your Oracle database performance issues, questions, and requirements.
by Buda Consulting | May 30, 2023 | Database Maintenance, Oracle, Oracle DBA
Companies need to migrate Oracle data for a long list of reasons, such as moving workloads from on-premises to a cloud or managed hosting environment, implementing a new system, or launching a big data initiative. But whatever their aim, Oracle database migration projects are widely known to pose a major risk of failure and budget overruns.
A big contributing factor is the misconception that these are simple data-moving operations. In fact, Oracle database migrations are often complex and require careful planning. Data migration services and technology alone are not a guarantee of success.
This post shares five tips for a successful Oracle database migration.
One: Recognize that Oracle database migrations are a business problem.
Any Oracle database migration is a data problem—and therefore a business problem—first, and an IT problem second. Not the other way around as conventionally assumed.
Without engagement from business and technical leaders, the chances of failure are very high. It’s important to get input from management stakeholders and to know upfront that adequate project resources will be allocated.
Too often, a lack of business involvement and commitment results in an Oracle database migration project that is fraught with unknowns and incorrect assumptions. These later manifest as data loading problems, functional testing failures, and other stumbling blocks leading to time and cost overruns. Eleventh-hour emergencies may also lead to engaging third-party Oracle data migration services without adequate due diligence.
Two: Don’t underestimate the scope of your Oracle database migration.
A big reason Oracle database migration projects falter is that they weren’t correctly scoped in the first place. Many organizations underestimate the effort required to migrate an Oracle database successfully.
Some of the reasons include:
- Lack of understanding of the current data landscape
- Lack of awareness of current data quality issues
- Viewing the migration as a simple data-moving exercise
- Failure to get input from business stakeholders on their needs during the project
- Inadequate data migration services, tools, and/or expertise to support the migration
Plus, like many IT-related projects, Oracle database migrations are subject to scope creep and specification changes. The better you can analyze your current data, including its volume, data types, etc., the better you can scope the migration.
Three: Focus on data quality from the outset.
“Garbage in, garbage out” is an inescapable reality when it comes to data. Why spend money moving data to a new environment or a new application if it isn’t usable? Yet it’s often when an existing database is migrated that errors, gaps, corruption, redundancies, and formatting issues rear their heads.
Even if the data was acceptable for its prior uses, it might not meet your new objectives, such as access by new applications. A successful Oracle database migration requires an upfront emphasis on delivering accurate data that meets business needs. Finding out at the last minute that data requires cleansing is sure to lead to project delays, budget crunches, and specification changes.
Four: Leverage appropriate Oracle technology.
From data cleansing to data movement to data governance, purpose-built Oracle technology can help automate your Oracle database migration to save effort and improve consistency and repeatability. Choosing Oracle tools also adds to the value of your Oracle investment.
For example, if you’re moving an on-premises Oracle database to the Oracle Cloud, Oracle offers a wide range of data migration services and tools to help you migrate data into your target cloud service (e.g., Oracle Autonomous Database, Hadoop, or Object Storage). These include:
- OCI Data Transfer Service, a low-cost data migration service that accelerates moving even large-scale datasets to or from Oracle Cloud.
- Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) for more efficient migration of on-premises databases to the Oracle Cloud leveraging high availability technologies like Oracle Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate.
- Oracle Data Pump to move data between Oracle databases via a choice of methods, including in the cloud and between on-premises and cloud.
Five: Leverage appropriate data migration services.
“We don’t know what we don’t know.” Thus, businesses may be unaware of their Oracle database migration challenges until they are blindsided in midstream.
While data migration services can help reduce time and cost impacts in these situations, they can also be of value upfront by helping you avoid or prepare for them. Data migration services can help you sort out your best options for moving Oracle workloads from your data center to a public cloud platform or managed database hosting provider, for instance. This starts you off on the right foot and helps eliminate risks to project success.
Data migration services can also give you on-demand access to specialized Oracle expertise that many businesses don’t have in-house. Unbiased, third-party experts can save time with valuable insights, as well as champion the best course of action from a range of options.
What’s next?
If you’re thinking of moving Oracle databases to a cloud or managed hosting environment, Buda Consulting can help you choose the best option for your workloads. We can also handle the complete migration process for you, from installing and configuring your new Oracle environment to migrating your data. All while minimizing downtime and business risk.
Contact us for a free “database discussion” to explore your Oracle database migration goals and concerns.
by Buda Consulting | May 13, 2023 | Database Security
They are two simple words, but they are two of the most feared words in business: Data Breach! When companies lose their data, they also lose stakeholder trust and the ability to conduct “business as usual.”
One common security gap is that many companies focus on network security while falling short on database security. Your network is important and should be secured, but it exists to move your data—the lifeblood of your business.
To help you focus on safeguarding your database in 2023, here is an Oracle database security assessment checklist. These are some of the best practices and controls you can put in place to secure and protect your data.
Key Oracle Database Security Assessment Questions
When many people think about security, it is usually in a general way. They want security, but don’t really define what security looks like. Here are some Oracle database security assessment questions to help you focus your attention on database security.
Are You Using Built-in Oracle Security Features?
Your Oracle database has many security features built in. These can be the first line of defense for your entire database. Many of these features are free and don’t require subscriptions, but are part of your database package.
Do You Have a Current User List?
A database should have a list of privileged users and over-privileged users. This list should show who can do what with the database. This list must stay current as a level of protection and accountability for your company.
Who Is Overseeing Oracle Security Updates?
Oracle often releases security updates, patches, and fixes to help ensure your data stays protected. With the speed of business today, these can be overlooked. You should have someone who makes sure these fixes are implemented immediately.
Are You Conducting Regular Database Audits?
Database auditing is how administrators review their users’ actions. They do this to see who is accessing the database. This helps ensure that only people who are supposed to access the database are doing so. Database auditing tools can also automatically identify and report on a wide spectrum of vulnerabilities including misconfigurations, missed security patches, use of default or weak passwords, and much more.
What Is Your Password Policy?
Passwords must be actively maintained in accordance with current best practices, or they can become an easy entryway into databases. You must make sure that there aren’t any default, weak, easily guessable, compromised, or non-expiring passwords with access to the system.
Are You Using the CIS Benchmark for Oracle?
The Center for Internet Security (CIS) is a nonprofit that provides “benchmarks”—configuration guides—to help businesses assess and improve the security of specific applications or systems. CIS has an Oracle database benchmark that specifies Oracle-specific configuration settings to mitigate known vulnerabilities and harden your database against attacks. CIS benchmarks also offer a prescriptive, proven approach to compliance with cybersecurity frameworks like NIST 800-171, ISO 27001, and CMMC.
Using the Oracle Database Security Assessment Tool
To help users have safer databases, Oracle developed the Database Security Assessment Tool (DBSAT). The DBSAT is a free tool that Oracle users can implement, which acts as a database security guide.
DBSAT will scan a database and give you a profile in different formats that helps you see the state of your security. The formats you can choose from include HTML, SLS, TEXT, or JSON. This makes the information quick and easy to digest.
The tool will show you some of the security risks that you currently have in the system. It will then recommend relevant products and features of the system you can use to help stop the risks.
The DBSAT focuses on three specific core areas with its security assessment:
1. The General Security Configuration of Your Database
The DBSAT can perform a scan to make sure you are minimizing database risk. It will look for missing security patches that you can implement. It will also check to see if you are using encryption auditing within your system.
2. Users and Their Entitlements
One of the main features of the DBSAT is its focus on your users and how they are accessing your system. It will identify your privileged users and show you what areas they can access, plus any areas they are accessing but shouldn’t be.
3. Identifying Sensitive Data in Your Database
The DBSAT will help you stay in compliance with regulations from PCI-DSS to HIPAA to GLBA to GDPR by focusing on your sensitive data. It will help you identify your sensitive data and recognize how it should be treated. This also helps you develop healthy database auditing processes.
Using DBSAT Guidance
DBSAT can help you with your security practices by giving you the information you need to implement and enforce strong security for your database. With the many reports it can generate, your database security doesn’t have to be forgotten.
DBSAT helps you understand your user accounts, along with the roles and privileges of each user. This helps you find and fix short-term risks. Plus, it can give you enough information to have a long-term security strategy.
Get a Database Health Check
Just like a person should have a check-up every year, you want to make sure your database gets a regular health check. The recommended approach is to have an unbiased third-party expert come in and review your database configuration and policies.
A trusted database security assessment partner can review your parameters, database maintenance procedures, alert logs, and trace files. They can also help with many other things, like finding your data blocks and identifying invalid objects.
Look for a health check protocol that includes a focused report so you can take action where it is needed most. The report should show you possible problem areas, help prioritize them, and recommend how to address the problems.
Your Oracle Database Partners
As this Oracle database security assessment checklist shows, there is a lot to think about when it comes to database safety. Too often IT staff are so focused on protecting the network, while the database environment is overlooked.
You want to find people who are database specialists and will make your database their own. Buda Consulting is a group of database experts who listen to your needs and deliver on our promises.
Our passion is protecting your database and helping it to function smoothly. We handle all aspects of database creation and management. Plus, we can show you how to extract valuable insights from your database.
Contact us for a free 15-minute call and let us show you how we can be your database experts.
by Buda Consulting | Apr 13, 2023 | Backup and Recovery
Your Oracle database needs its own disaster recovery (DR) plan to ensure that its recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are met in the event of an outage. Some level of Oracle database disaster recovery testing is the only way to shake out problems with your plan/runbook.
Common issues that stall recovery in today’s interdependent environments include communication disconnects and missing data. It’s not easy orchestrating recovery across your database, storage, network, etc.
There are several Oracle database disaster recovery approaches to suit different recovery needs, along with a range of third-party options and custom configurations. Your DR plan can include a remote site, a failover system, and/or offsite storage for database backups and archived logs, among other components.
But whatever DR technology and plan you have in place, if you don’t test them ahead of time they might very well fail when you need them most.
DR testing types
The good news about Oracle database disaster recovery testing is the basics apply regardless of your test plan specifics. There are three DR testing types:
- Plan review. Here, the team that helped developed the DR plan closely reviews it to identify missing steps or process disconnects.
- Tabletop exercise. Similar to a play rehearsal, in a tabletop exercise, the people involved in executing the DR plan go through it carefully step-by-step to make sure they know what to do and the steps make sense and lead to the desired results.
- Simulation. A simulation attempts to mimic a real-world disaster scenario as closely as possible. It can validate whether your Oracle database disaster recovery team can restart the necessary hardware and software in sync with the RTO timeline and whether your backup, redundancy, and/or failover systems work as expected.
Which approach to do? Usually, that depends on the criticality of your database and the time since your last test. The more your database environment has changed since your last simulation, the more comprehensive your Oracle database disaster recovery testing needs to be.
Simulation scenarios
If you’re doing a simulation, it’s helpful to base it on a specific disaster scenario. Some of the most common real-world disaster scenarios your database could face include an external or insider cyber-attack, hardware failure, data corruption, human error, extreme weather, flooding, and fire.
DR plan testing frequency
How often should you test your Oracle database disaster recovery plan? It’s a function of the RTO for your database. If your RTO is 2 days, for example, you could get away with testing maybe twice per year. If you need high availability and near-instant recovery, you should plan on testing your Oracle database DR plans much more frequently.
Another variable in testing frequency is major changes in your Oracle database environment. You need to make sure that important changes are reflected in your DR plan, and you don’t want to find out during a real disaster that they’re not.
Next steps
The importance of Oracle database disaster recovery is hard to calculate. But it is easy to underestimate the financial and reputational impacts of disasters, which can add up to millions of dollars per hour in some industries. The general expectation has become that businesses are available 24×7, and tolerance for downtime is low.
At Buda Consulting, we know how much our clients rely on their databases. Our Reliability Review is a proven approach to evaluating your current risk scenario and deciding what level of protection you need. Contact us to find out more.
by Buda Consulting | Mar 29, 2023 | Backup and Recovery
Disasters can range from a critical database crashing to a ransomware attack to the complete stoppage of your business operations. Whatever happens, two concerns top the list: how long will it take you to recover, and how much data will you lose?
To make sure you don’t experience more downtime and/or data loss than your business can withstand, you need to define two key metrics that will guide disaster recovery planning for each of your critical workloads:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the time between the onset of an outage and a return to business as usual
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the maximum amount of data your business can lose before experiencing significant impacts, measured by volume or time
Ideally, all your critical applications would failover automatically and have continuous real-time backups, so your RTO and RPO would both be zero. But while technically possible, these measures are too costly for many businesses to contemplate.
This is why you need realistic RTO vs RPO calculations to help design your recovery process and determine backup methods and frequencies.
RTO vs RPO both start with application priority
When thinking about RTO vs RPO, it’s not a question of which metric is more important because they are interrelated. How long it takes to recover impacts how much data you’ll lose, and how much data you can afford to lose drives how fast you need to recover.
A best practice is to factor application importance and priority into your RTO vs RPO calculations. For example, the most mission-critical customer-facing services with the highest cost per minute of the outage may require a near-zero RTO, necessitating failover capabilities. Other applications, such as an HR database, might be OK with an RTO of 24 hours.
With RPO, the more difficult it is to recover or recreate the data, the shorter the associated RPO should be. Mission-critical databases might require continuous, real-time replication for a near-zero RPO, while an RPO of 24 hours might suffice for data that you can recreate from your last backup using “pen and paper” sources.
Accuracy matters
Another best practice is to make your RTO vs RPO estimates as accurate as possible. If you’re too conservative, you’ll end up spending more than you need to on backup services, redundant systems, etc. If you’re too lax, your business could face unacceptable risks that threaten its continuity and even survival.
In the end, it’s about balancing your IT budget against the business value/criticality of your IT services and associated data. Costs for backups, storage, and other technology add up quickly. But so do the costs of downtime and data loss—from lost sales to lost customers to a damaged reputation that can haunt you for years. A further RTO vs RPO consideration in regulated industries is whether the loss of certain irreplaceable transaction data (e.g., medical records or other personal data) could constitute a compliance violation and result in sanctions.
Next steps
What are the “right” RTO vs RPO numbers for your workloads? It’s often not easy to arrive at answers that satisfy all stakeholders. You’ll need to start by meeting with senior leaders to identify which systems and databases are central to operations and/or produce the most revenue.
RTO vs RPO values for individual systems also needs to be embedded in the context of a risk-based, prioritized disaster recovery or business continuity plan for all your IT systems and databases in the aggregate. Balancing the factors mentioned above, from the nature of the event to the importance of the application/data to regulatory risks, takes objectivity and experience. Then there’s the question of how best to leverage technology to meet your agreed RTOs and RPOs.
For expert help with defining, selecting, and implementing the perfect disaster recovery solution for your databases, your business, and your budget, contact Buda Consulting.
