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Overview

The Oracle Standard Management Pack is an optional set of applications that provide advanced tools that allow you to monitor and diagnose problems, tune high impact indexes, and track and compare changes in your Oracle9i environment.

The Oracle Standard Management Pack includes the following applications:

• Oracle Performance Manager

  Applies real-time, graphical Oracle and host monitoring through an extensive array of customized performance charts.

• Oracle Index Tuning Wizard

  Pro actively optimizes the indexes in your database environment.

• Oracle Baseline Viewer

  Lets you display baselines created using Create Baseline.

• Oracle Change Manager

  Gives you direct or indirect access to change management operations.

• Oracle Create Baseline

  Captures definitions of schema objects.

• Oracle Compare Database Objects

  Allows you to easily compare schemas or databases.

• Oracle TopSessions Chart

  Provides focused, performance diagnostics for Oracle sessions.

The following sections provide an overview of these applications.

What's New in Oracle Standard Management Pack for Release 9i

The following list provides the new features and enhancements to release 9i of the Oracle Standard Management Pack.

• An enhanced real time diagnostics interface that builds on the new performance data organization and drilldowns for Performance Manager.
  • New organization of the Database Health overview diagnostics charts for easier performance assessment.
  • Integration of host operating system diagnostics data in the Database Health overview, providing a single monitoring point for databases and operating systems.
  • Drilldowns to diagnostics advice.
• Automated generation and web publication of Performance Manager charts. This allows the administrator to set up status and performance reports that are periodically updated for access from a web server by other database administrators and system managers. This supports all services covered by Performance Manager.
• New top activity diagnostics charts for finding and troubleshooting high impact sessions and SQL in Performance Manager.
  • New filtering capabilities providing complete flexibility in searching for high impact activity, such as high cost SQL by object or type.
  • New top details provide graphical performance data to help diagnose a problem session or SQL statement.
• Direct Connect Performance Manager that allows database monitoring without the Agent and OMS.
• Architectural enhancements for better performance and scalability for Change Manager. In this release there are performance improvements for Capture and Compare operations running against large schemas.
• Extended coverage for Instance parameters in tracking applications. Change Manager is extended to capture and compare Oracle instance parameters. You can compare instance parameters between any combination of databases and baselines. This is valuable in diagnosing performance problems.
• Browser-based implementation.

Oracle Performance Manager

Oracle Performance Manager provides a system for capturing, filtering, and presenting performance data for both the database and the host operating system. Oracle Performance Manager offers:

• Graphical, real-time monitoring

  With Oracle Performance Manager, database and host operating system performance statistics are captured in real-time mode and can be viewed in various tables and charts and in two- and three-dimensional presentations.

• Predefined charts

  Oracle Performance Manager provides a large collection of predefined charts and tables organized into performance monitoring groups, including database contention, I/O, load, memory use, instance metrics, parallel server performance, and host operating system resource usage.

• User-defined charts

  Oracle Performance Manager can be used to graphically display any data accessible through SQL or through the data collection framework. The application allows you to create customized charts from user-defined scripts which then can be added to the Oracle Performance Manager navigator tree for easy access.

• Customizable chart attributes and displays

  With Oracle Performance Manager, chart properties and attributes can be customized to change the type of the presentation. The type of chart can be changed to bar, hierarchical, strip, pie, or table.

• Chart drill down

  Allows charts to be linked to other charts to gather detailed information.

• Record and playback of charts

  A user can capture a chart's activity for analysis at a later date. Oracle Performance Manager allows charts to be recorded and played back at your convenience.

Oracle Index Tuning Wizard

The Oracle Index Tuning wizard quickly finds indexing problems that can slow down the performance of your Oracle8 database. You can use the Index Tuning wizard to evaluate and optimize indexes for situations when, for example, SQL statement response time is slow.

The Index Tuning wizard considers your application type, for example, data warehousing, table, and SQL statements for tuning.

The Index Tuning wizard then implements the generated recommendations or saves the recommendations for later implementation. Each index recommendation generated contains detailed information on exactly what operation needs to be performed on the schema.

Oracle Change Manager

The Change Manager application is the change management central interface. In most cases, Change Manager gives you direct or indirect access to change management operations, such as creating baselines with Create Baseline and comparing database object definitions with Compare Database Objects.

Create Baseline

The Create Baseline application guides you through the process of capturing the definitions of a database (or a subset of a database) in a form useful to Compare Database Objects and other applications. Create Baseline lets you specify the set of database object definitions to capture, then captures those definitions in their current state.

Create Baseline can capture object definitions in both of the following forms:

• A baseline. The baseline stores definitions in a form that Create Baseline can use. (A baseline is an object that contains a set of database definitions captured at a certain time.)
• SQL DDL (optional). These SQL DDL statements can be used to create the definitions in a new database or as input to CASE tools that accept SQL DDL input.

The Baseline Viewer application lets you display baselines created using Create Baseline. Baseline Viewer also allows you to view a particular version of a baseline and to generate SQL statements for a baseline (if the statements were not generated already by Create Baseline when the baseline was created).

Compare Database Objects

The Compare Database Objects application guides you through the steps of selecting two sets of object definitions and then comparing them. The object definitions can be selected from current databases or they can be selected from baselines created earlier with Compare Database Objects. If differences are found when the two sets of object definitions are compared, the Comparison Viewer allows you to view the differences between the corresponding object definitions.

Oracle TopSessions

The Oracle TopSessions chart provides a focused view of database activity by database session. Oracle TopSessions extracts and analyzes sample dynamic Oracle performance data by session, automatically determining the top Oracle users based on a specific selection criteria, such as memory, CPU usage, or file I/O activity.