7.1 What has to be managed

Once the warehouse has been created and is populated with data, it is very important to ensure that it is correctly managed. The warehouse must be configured for optimal performance and availability. Disk, memory, and CPU resources must be managed. In this chapter, we will describe some of the management tasks and provide advice on how to execute them.

Once again, we will make use of the GUI tools provided in Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) to manage our database. There are alternative methods to this approach, but we are sure you will agree that using OEM makes managing the database considerably easier.

This chapter will first provide an introduction to OEM, discuss various techniques to back up your data warehouse using Recovery Manager (RMAN), the importance of developing a strategy for disaster recovery, reorganizing the warehouse, gathering optimizer statistics, tuning the ware-house, maintaining security, and monitoring space use.

7.2 Managing using Oracle Enterprise Manager

Oracle Enterprise Manager can be used to manage any database, located anywhere on the wide area network. Therefore, from this one tool, you can manage your entire system, no matter where the components might be. This is an extremely powerful capability, and you should remember that what we are describing here could be used not only for the data warehouse but also for other databases on your network. In this section, we'll take a look at some of the concepts and steps required to start using OEM.

Enterprise Manager is...