My former boss, and current friend, bought an Android phone for himself and his wife last week and asked me for a list of my must-have apps. I’ll list them here for the morbidly curious, but that got me thinking – what are my must-have scripts for managing my Oracle database? I know we’re supposed to use they ‘tool’ things, but I seriously doubt any real DBA relies 100% on what a pretty console screen tells them. DBAs collect scripts like that guy John Cusack played in Fidelity collects records.

If I were to put the pager-holster back on tomorrow in production land, what ‘bullets’ would I have loaded for an emergency? What jobs would I have running to keep things in shape? Here’s a few that I came up with and-or remembered from using ‘back-in-the-day.’

Oracle Scripts to Keep Me Warm at Night

  • Privs & Roles folks should not have – EVER! (SELECT ANY DICTIONARY, DBA, etc…)
  • My ORA-600′s in the Alert Logs
  • Default vendor supplied Users/Passwords active in the database
  • All the BlackHat stuff like using JAVA to grant yourself privileges
  • Storage drudgery – I know it’s the ‘Automatic’ part of ASM, but what’s it look like, where do I need to go do something
  • Backups, backups, backups – are they running, are they usuable, …
  • Check the Audit Trails

    • Help me out real DBAs, what are the routine things you do every day via script? Disclaimer: Your ideas might end up in my presentations/demos as use cases!

    Oh yeah, here’s my ‘must-have’ list of apps for Android:

  • Angry Birds
  • AK Notepad
  • Amazon MP3
  • Barcode scanner
  • DC Metro Transit
  • DIRECTV
  • doubleTwist
  • Find Starbucks
  • Google EVERYTHING
  • Lookout
  • Pandora
  • Skype Mobile
  • TripIt
  • TV.com
  • Twitter
  • Yelp