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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: 3rd Party Database health check
Niall - My first reaction is that if the DBA team's credibility is that low,
perhaps they should focus on improving their credibility. If the outside
people say that everything is just great, then management doesn't feel they
received their money's worth. So naturally the consultants have to find a
few things. Then the next issue is whether these are really serious issues
or just small issues the consultants are making a big deal of and whether
management will know the difference. Then your credibility will really be in
tatters.
Often consultants are most use are when you already know the conclusions you want them to reach. For instance if the backup configuration is inadequate, but management doesn't want to buy more equipment. If the consultants point that out, then it may be clearer to senior management.
I could also see where very new sites or sites that are extremely complex or sites that are anticipating enormous growth might benefit from an outside review.
I also have a form if you want to audit your own database.
Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Niall Litchfield [mailto:n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 10:13 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: 3rd Party Database health check
Sorry I should have been more clear, I intended to mean paying 3rd party co= nsultants to come in and do a manual health check of ones databases. The id= ea is good or rather not bad, it helps give damagement some outside confide= nce in the DBA team a bit like a network security check. On the other hand = if you can say that everything is satisfactorily backed up without actually=seeing any proof that the backups worked....=20 =20
--=20
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK
-----Original Message-----
From: thomas.mercadante_at_labor.state.ny.us
Sent: 04 February 2004 15:51
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org; thomas.mercadante_at_labor.state.ny.us
Subject: RE: 3rd Party Database health check
We just looked at Tivoli Monitoring for Oracle. The sales presentation sounded good. But when we started looking at what exactly they could monitor "out of the box", we rejected everything except for database up/down, listener up/down and archive directory getting full. It had a bunch of Oracle internal things it could monitor (like tablespace filling up, user process monitoring etc, but we just didn't want to implement a monster, and some other stuff just didn't make any sense (like BCHR). And we thought that it would be sending us way too many emails or pages to turn anything else on.
Just my 2 cents.
Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional
-----Original Message-----
From: Niall Litchfield [mailto:n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 10:40 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: 3rd Party Database health check
Does anyone have any experience of these, what sort of things got looked at and what stuff didn't get looked at? We have had 2 that seemed to be somewhat useless and annoying, I am not sure that this is because they are useless and annoying or if we were just unlucky. I don't mind folk checking that we backup our databases for example, but passing our backup strategy without seeing whether it worked or not doesn't inspire confidence
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission
+44 117 975 7805
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