« Agile Provisioning | Main | Automating Lunch »
Highlights of a Successful IT Professional
By Eric Gross | December 4, 2007
Starting in April of this year, I started to assemble the content that would become this blog. Our goal in creating this blog was to reach out to everyone who could benefit from our thoughts about managing life’s data - this includes customers, partners, candidates, and even our employees. We strive to connect the dots in a unique way so that you, the reader, can gain a new perspective. A new view on something highly specific, perhaps an issue we have worked around, or something broader - dealing with the people and processes that surround our professional lives.
Looking back, I think it would be beneficial to catalog the ground covered this year and assemble a brief abstraction of the landscape.
Logical Arguments
- Once you are have successfully implemented a set of steps that accomplish a goal, Stick With It until there is a true reason to deviate from that procedure.
- Succeed at what you do, starting with creating a valid description of success in whatever you strive to do.
- Art is nice to look at, but when your database is artistic you have a problem.
- Create a script rather than running commands interactively (once you get it working).
- Think about performance tuning based on business requirements.
- Don’t get stuck when things get hard - reevaluate your situation and move forward.
- Build on the existing body of work available to you rather then starting from the ground level (again).
- The more you can see at once, the better you’ll be able to deal with distributed systems.
- The amount of data in the enterprise is growing quickly, do you know where all the important stuff is?
Procedures
- Automation is easy to start but hard to complete, at least without our software.
- The ability to change a production system without impacting the clients that are dependent on the server is tough - this post on Agile Provisioning should get you thinking about the challenges.
- Consider the metaphors before you decide how to “drive” your goals to completion.
- Talk to your peers about issues you are encountering, and “write” everything down in a central place.
- When executing multi-step processes, ensure that the previous step completed successfully before you move onto the next step.
- Patching critical systems must be done in some cases, but other times leave well enough alone.
- How can you deal with a project that is too big to fit in your brain all at once.
- We reflect on the VA’s recent horrible day.
Database Management
- There are a lot of entities that have differing storage requirements - consider your storage options.
- You can create fresh databases from scratch or from a seed.
- You can provision new Oracle Homes from scratch or from a clone image.
- Simplicity is good: unnecessary dependencies are bad, as are special cases. Simplify your ASM configuration.
- Cluster Verify is a flawed tool so take its results with a grain of salt.
- Maximize the performance of your NFS mounts used for Oracle.
- My list of favorite Metalink notes related to database provisioning.
- Use your time more wisely by bringing GridApp Clarity into the fold where you work, here’s what you can expect when you take the leap.
- Use standard listener names to avoid an Oracle CRS bug.
- Password files can cause problems when they aren’t setup right, especially when using the DBCA.
- 11g is finally here, time to start working out the kinks.
- Oracle proves again that they don’t test patches before releasing them, at least on 64-bit Linux.
GridApp
- Clarity 4.0 was released to the satisfaction of database professionals everywhere.
- We launched our Jobs@GridApp page.
- Our CMDB can ease you into the water gently.
- Most DBA’s spend little of their precious time dealing with security; we can change that.
- GridApp is helping IT professionals everywhere to apply for jobs with aplomb, and people prove they’re listening.
Wow - we covered a lot of ground! Look to next year for even more valuable information related to databases and our IT landscape.
Topics: Uncategorized