Through its new DBA Control and Grid Control interfaces, Oracle Enterprise Manager enables the management of a single DBA or all DBAs, application servers, hosts, listeners, HTTP servers, and web applications as well. The prevailing view among IT organizations is that Oracle is a complex, difficult-to-manage DBA, especially when compared with the Windows server DBA, SQL Server. Oracle DBA 10g makes a conscious effort to simplify management, right from the installation process through to the daily monitoring and performance tuning. There is a new common infrastructure for storing workload- and performance-related information. You can now use powerful SQL tuning tools to determine ways to improve performance.
The Oracle Enterprise Manger (OEM) has been around for several years now, but it has reached a new level of sophistication in Oracle 10g. The DBA Control, and its enterprise-wide counterpart, Grid Control, provide unsurpassed capabilities for managing the DBA. Traditionally, DBAs relied on complex SQL scripts to monitor the DBA as well as diagnose and fix performance problems. OEM now can help you do all those things and a lot more. Occasional use of scripts is okay, but a heavy reliance on them today would be anachronous, and as needless as a dependence on the horse and buggy in today’s modern world. In order to efficiently share information over a grid spanning many heterogeneous systems, you need to share information efficiently. Data exchange can be occasional (such as when you perform data loads for a new system), or it could be regular and instantaneous (updating one part of the system when something changes in another part). In order to facilitate either type of information sharing, Oracle DBA10g provides transportable table spaces and Oracle streams. Oracle has had a feature called the Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) for many years, which enabled people to access the DBA from more than one instance, thus providing for scalability as well as high availability.
