ZDLRA System Activity Report

The Recovery Appliance or ZDLRA is a great way to ensure consistent Backup and Recovery of you Oracle Database but as DBA's we often want to see what is happening Behind the Covers. As with every Oracle Product there is a GUI (Enterprise Manager) or Command line based environment.
The ZDLRA Development team just released a very nifty little script that is available via

Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance System Activity Script (Doc ID 2275176.1) This System is supposed to be used in conjunction with Enterprise Manager and a different way of l The script is broken down into Multiple Sections  and the header is very important  to read and understand

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 ZDLRA Activity script: 09-Jun-2017

Oracle suggests Enterprise Manager as the proper tool for monitoring

 a Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance.  However, this simple script

 provides a different perspective on activity on the system and

 can be another aid in understanding system activity.

 The intention is that this script is run daily and only provides

 a short history of events

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This is followed by the version of the ZDLRA Software you are running. 

VERSION       NAME

---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------

22-05-2017 10:06:57  ZDLRA_12.1.1.1.8.201705_LINUX.X64_RELEASE       ZDLRA

In This case this is the release of 12.1.1.1.8 that was released on 22nd of May

The you will see the General State of the system and in a Healthy Environment. there will be idling schedulers and the oldest work will be displayed. Typically the oldest work should be be a couple of hours /days old . If not that might point to some discrepancy and an SR should be opened to evaluate this situation

STATE   SCHEDULERS CURRENT_TIMER_ACTION RESOURCE_WAIT_TASK OLD_WORK

-----         ----------             -------------------------                   --------------------                    ------------

ON           176                  Idling                               UNLIMITED           21-JUN-2017

Then this is followed up by an examination of what is running on the system. On a regular system you will see both Work and Maintenance tasks.

  TASK_TYPE STATE     CURRENT_COUNT LAST_EXECUTE_TIME  WORK_TYPE   MIN_CREATION

----------                -----                -------------               --------------------                    -----------            ------------

PURGE_DUP  RUNNING 1                 09-JUL-2017 10:46:47         Work          09-JUL-2017

CROSSCHECK_DB TASK_WAIT 1                            Maintenance     09-JUL-2017

VALIDATE  TASK_WAIT 1                                    Maintenance     09-JUL-2017

Next Section Displays the State of Storage on the Recovery Appliance and can be used as a measure of understanding how much space has been used on the Recovery Appliance.

 TOTAL_SPACE USED_SPACE FREESPACE FREESPACE_GOAL

-------------               -------------               -------------      --------------

   596048.371           321061.930              274986.051   5960.484

The next Sections include Status of Replication Server and Task History for the last day. This is particularly helpful to assess how things are running.

There are also sections that include that state of each Database and how many days of Backups are available , Locally and replicated as well as sections that show all the incidents in the system and if any config changes were made to the system that were non default.

While Enterprise Manager is still the preferred way of ensuring you see , manage and get alerted on the Recovery Appliance. This handy little script is a nice way to see the overall status a Recovery Appliance really quickly

 

Setting up Redo Transport With Standby's for ZDLRA with EM 13.2

Oracle ZDLRA or Zero Data loss Recovery Appliance allows for transporting redo from the protected database and stores it securely inside the Recovery Appliance. This allows for near zero Recovery Point Objectives to be met.

Setting up Real time redo Transport involves setting up a wallet and redo_transport_user  parameter to the virtual private catalog user as well as definition and archive log destination that points to the Recovery Appliance . This allows redo to be shipped to the Appliance and Stored for future restores and recoveries.

If the Database Environment does not have an associated Standby , this procedure is very simple and Enterprise manager can handle the setup or it can be done easily via command line as described here in the documentation. Since we are changing the redo_transport_user , this brings in some interesting considerations for standby databases. 

The Default Behavior for redo shipping to a standby database  uses sys as the user that is used for transport and apply unless  there is a value in redo_transport_user.   The REDO_TRANSPORT_USER database initialization parameter can be used to select a different user password for redo transport authentication by setting this parameter to the name of any user who has been granted the SYSOPER privilege. This User will need to be created in the protected database and needs to be exactly the same as the Virtual Private Catalog user that has been created on the Recovery Appliance Catalog. The procedure to setup a protected database that is a part of a dataguard configuration is detailed in the Whitepaper here.

With Enterprise Manager 13.2 this procedure has now been automated and is accessible via the Data guard administration menu

In the Dataguard Administration screen you will see a button to add the Recovery Appliance

The Add Recovery Appliance screen will ask you for the Recovery Appliance to configure with this protected database and since this is a standby will provide details on what will happen

You will need to provide Host credentials for the Primary and Standby Databases. This will result in a Job being submitted to perform the tasks

You can then view the Status of this procedure

The End result will be the Protected Database as well as the Standby Database configured along with the Recovery Appliance.

The Enterprise Manager team is hard at working on developing new features and hopefully this new feature will allow for easier and faster configurations of Protected Databases that also have a standby associated with them. 

Happy new year

It's the start of a new year , and as with all new years it's time to prepare and start learning a fresh. Oracle as a database , as a technology , as a field is constantly being update from being a database to a platform to a cloud provider .
Learning is the core of what we thrive to do . as technology evolves , the opportunities to learn increase .

This year i had the pleasure to emerse myself to technologies that spanned between on-premises and the cloud and i hope to continue my learning curve

Benjamin Stotter / 500px