Chapter 14: Odds and Ends

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This chapter is dedicated to all of the things that I have stumbled on that are interesting, that have come in handy for me to remember when I am enmeshed in my Apps DBA duties, and that I have found out the hard way.

Alerts

Oracle Alerts can be one of an Apps administrator's best friends. Alerts will keep you regularly informed of critical information concerning activity in your database in a format that you choose and assist you with automating system maintenance and in scheduling and performing online tasks. Through Oracle Alerts, you can monitor and control exceptions and react quickly when an exception presents itself. Not only can you create Alerts that monitor critical database activity, you can utilize the same facilities to monitor critical data driven activity that can impact your business processes.

Alerts can take two formats: an Event Alert or a Periodic Alert.

An Event Alert notifies specified administrators about activity information in the database as that activity occurs. The information that is required by the Alert system is a database event that you want to monitor for, a SQL statement that will retrieve the information that is a result of that event, and an action that you want the Alert system to perform as a result of that event. An action can include anything from sending an e-mail message to a list of users, sending a digital text message to a pager, running a Concurrent Program or an OS script, or running another specified SQL statement. If your database throws an ORA-00600 error, your Event Alert can send you an e-mail that contains the string following the alert message to assist in creating iTARs. But an Event Alert can take other forms other than just monitoring the physical running state of the database. It will alert the specified person of any event in the database: an insert, update, or delete on a particularly sensitive table, for example. It can be used for business logic as well as technical monitoring. It does not have to be a simple error condition; it can be a unique combination that would only occur if something out of the ordinary had occurred or if there were some unusual condition happening in the company. Further, it can alert you to the fact that there are currently no error conditions in the database.

A Periodic Alert periodically checks the database per your specified schedule. The same information is required when setting up a periodic alert as is required when setting up an Event Alert, but instead of an event, you provide the period on which you want the information retrieval query run. With a Periodic Alert, you can have current performance measurements at a glance. A Periodic Alert can provide you with trouble spots that you can zero in on to provide performance enhancements. There are several predefined Alerts that you can make use of or you can define your own and you can define them on even your custom modules so that you can be able to see what is occurring there, as well. Your business can define Periodic Alerts that will run and alert a manager as to the number of outstanding invoices or purchase orders that require attention. Periodic Alerts also tell the manager how many were processed since the last time the Alert ran in a given time period or ever.

Not only can you receive Alerts, you can query the Alert history and receive a total picture of what has been occurring on your system and make determinations based on the total overall picture.

You may find that, if used well, Alerts can be one of your biggest assets in monitoring and maintaining your database and your overall system.

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