Are Your DBAs Performing Complete Oracle EBS Health Checks?

Oracle E-Business Suite is so complex and multifaceted that it can sometimes feel like a living, breathing organism. And like any other organism, Oracle EBS needs regular health checks to verify that it’s running in peak condition.

 
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a “self-cleaning” database. Nearly all Oracle deployments will degrade in performance over time, simply due to the intricacy of Oracle EBS and the realities of storing data on a physical medium.

An Oracle health check is a “checkup” to ensure that your applications have been fully optimized. Health checks include daily, weekly, monthly quarterly, and annual tasks that should be performed to reduce incidents – especially on robust platforms like Oracle EBS.

The types of health checks available in an Oracle environment are:

• Database structural integrity checks: These verify the integrity of database files and detect files that are corrupt or inaccessible.
• Data block integrity checks: These detect issues with your disk image blocks such as checksum failures, head/tail mismatches, and logical inconsistencies.
• Redo integrity checks: These scan the redo logs and archive logs to find evidence of corruption.
• Dictionary integrity checks: These examine the integrity of core objects in the Oracle data dictionary, such as tab$ and col$.

 
Your DBAs may choose to perform any or all of these health checks, depending on the specifics of your Oracle environment. What’s clear, however, is the need to have a well-defined testing plan for your Oracle EBS deployment. In order to avoid problems like slowness, unavailability, and security flaws, your DBAs must be proactive in the tasks of maintenance and monitoring.

Oracle health checks can be challenging in terms of the knowledge and experience they require from your DBAs. Still, that’s no excuse not to perform health checks on a regular basis. If you fail to do so, you may have problems with logging into the system, long delays when updating the database, and difficulties restoring the database from backup–just to name a few.

Fortunately, Datavail is here to help. We are sharing a portion of our complete health check process to kick off your optimization of Oracle EBS. Download our Oracle EBS Punch List that contains the 18 most essential items to include in your daily proactive health checks. This is a sneak peek at the proprietary daily checks our expert DBAs perform for our clients on a regular basis.

Want to talk about how we can help automate your health checks? Contact one of our EBS experts today.