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How Your Job Changes with GridApp Clarity
By Eric Gross | August 3, 2007
Your job, no matter how you interact with the database, changes with GridApp Clarity. You can absorb Clarity with whatever rapidity makes sense in your organization, and since there is such a breadth of functionality, it makes sense to use it to solve current problems now while thinking future to what issues can be mitigated using Clarity.
Visualize My Environments
You are responsible for managing a set of databases and all of their component instances, as well as related hosts, Oracle Homes, patches, initialization parameters, files, and all of the other Oracle objects that need to be managed. How do you look at these objects and the relationships that exist among them? Clarity shows all of these objects in some combination of the following ways:
- Contextual View - The GridApp Clarity interface provides a hierarchal representation of your infrastructure including an arbitrary domain (currently 5-levels deep is possible), clusters, databases, and database instances.
- Information Repository - The GridApp Clarity information repository contains data regarding all of the objects mentioned above. Full historical data is stored making it possible to compare objects to their former selfs as well as enabling the comparison of n-objects at a single point in time.
Patch my Environments
The stream of patches intensifies every year from the database vendors. You are familiar with your current patching processes, I will just touch upon the process when using Clarity. Following is the procedure using Clarity:
- Acquire database patch to apply
- Import patch into GridApp Clarity
- Apply the patch to your test servers
- Certify the patch for the test environment and similar environments
- Apply the patch to your environments using just a few clicks (and rollback if required with similar ease)
- Track your patch installations for issues
Provision New Environments
Even if you are better at provisioning than any company I have ever seen (and we’re talking about some heavy-hitters here), then you stand to gain by getting rid3 of your internal provisioning scripts. Here at GridApp we spend all of our time creating a piece of software that is capable of handling all issues with the databases we manage. We test our scripts nightly on a wide variety of platforms, using a variety of database software versions. The bugs we work around for one customer are automatically available to all of our customers. We are making the wheel rounder and rounder every day, and you can benefit from that by using Clarity.
Topics: Clarity, Consistency, Database Automation, Efficiency, Provisioning, Repeatability, Simplicity