Manageability and Self-management

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features and optional products allow database administrators to become more productive, and helps their organizations reduce management costs and scale to manage the Enterprise Computing Grid.

SAP’s DBA Cockpit is a platform-independent tool that you can use to monitor and administer your Oracle database and Real Application Clusters. It provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for all actions and covers all aspects of handling a database system landscape.

SAP’s BR*Tools Studio is a powerful database administration package for Oracle databases. It is a browser-based Web application that lets you select the database tasks known from BR*Tools and then instructs BR*Tools to run the chosen task on the relevant database.

When creating a table in a locally managed tablespace in Oracle Database 11g Release 2, table segment creation is deferred until the first row is inserted. In addition, creation of segments is deferred for any LOB columns of the table, for any indexes created implicitly as part of table creation, and for any indexes subsequently explicitly created on the table.

• White Paper: Optimizing Storage in SAP with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (PDF)

Before Oracle Database 11g, adding new columns with DEFAULT values and NOT NULL constraint required both an exclusive lock on the table and the default value to be stored in all existing records. Now, adding new columns with DEFAULT values and NOT NULL constraints no longer requires the default value to be stored in all existing records, saving time and space.

• White Paper: Optimizing Storage in SAP with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (PDF)

Oracle Diagnostics Pack, a part of the Oracle Database 11g product set, offers a comprehensive set of automatic performance diagnostics and monitoring functionality built into the core database engine and Oracle Enterprise Manager. Oracle Diagnostics Pack 11g includes powerful technologies that automate the monitoring of the complete environment and make the required information readily available to administrators. It automatically examines the vital signs of different components, such as databases, individual instances and host operating systems, and stores the required historical information to provide administrators a long-term view of their system behavior and help them administer service- level goals more effectively.

Oracle Diagnostics Pack diagnostics and analysis features such as ADDR, ASH, and AWR are tightly integrated with SAP’s DBA Cockpit.

The Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack automates the deployment of software, applications, and patches. It makes critical data center operations easy, efficient and scalable, resulting in lower operational risk and cost of ownership. The ability to provision the entire software stack that includes the operating system, middleware and database, supplemented by comprehensive reporting tools, make the Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack an extremely significant entity in overall system management space.

For SAP environments, the MOPatch utility is integrated with the deployment procedures of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control to automate the orchestration of patching for Oracle databases.

• White Paper: Patching of Oracle Databases in SAP Environments using Oracle Enterprise Manager (PDF)

With Oracle Database 11g, it is possible to install single or bundle patches completely online, without requiring the database instance to be shut down, and without requiring RAC or Data Guard configurations.

MOPatch is a wrapper utility around Oracle’s OPatch for applying multiple patches in a single run. It was specifically developed for SAP on Oracle environments, and it can be used for single instance as well as RAC configurations.

Oracle Real Application Testing combines a workload capture and replay feature with an SQL performance analyzer to help you test changes against real-life workloads, and then helps you fine-tune the changes before putting them into production.

• White Paper: Real Application Testing Certified for SAP (PDF)

With Oracle Database 11g, you can open a physical standby database read/write for reporting purposes, and then flash back to a point in the past to be easily converted back to a physical standby database—at which point Oracle Data Guard automatically synchronizes the standby database with the primary database. This allows the physical standby database to be utilized for read/write reporting activities for SAP applications like SAP NetWeaver BW. Oracle 11g snapshot standby database receives and archives, but does not apply, redo data from a primary database. Redo data received from the primary database is applied when a snapshot standby database is converted back into a physical standby database, after discarding all local updates to the snapshot standby database.

Oracle Partitioning allows tables, indexes, and index-organized tables to be subdivided into smaller pieces, enabling these database objects to be managed and accessed at a finer level of granularity. Oracle provides a comprehensive range of partitioning schemes to address every business requirement. Since it is entirely transparent in SQL statements, partitioning can be applied to any application, from OLTP (e.g. SAP ERP) to Data Warehousing (e.g. SAP BW).

Table and Index Partitioning is used by default in SAP BW systems that run on Oracle. In SAP ERP (or similar OLTP) databases it can be implemented using either the SAP Partitioning Engine or a service offered by the Oracle Support and Services for SAP team.

Explore other features of Oracle Database to find out why it is the database of choice for the majority of SAP customers.

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