In order to maintain the system, there are several daily tasks and other routine tasks that are recommended. The following subsections list several routine tasks that must be performed in order to detect any system irregularities before they become disastrous.
Daily Tasks
- Check the backup logs to ensure that the backup to disk - as well as to tape - was successful.
- Check the Oracle alerts log on the database server for any possible errors related to Oracle. The alerts log is located in the $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/<DB_UNIQUE_NAME>/<ORACLE_SID>/trace/alert_<ORACLE_SID>.log directory. If any error is encountered, it is necessary to determine if the error is of a disastrous nature or if it can be ignored.
- Check the system logs for any possible system and/or application errors that are of a disastrous nature.
- Check the RAID utility (if applicable) for any errors related to disks.
- Gather statistics on tables owned by the stepsys user. This is automatically done by a scheduled Oracle job, which is created as part of the STEP installation.
Other Tasks
- To ensure that the Oracle database has been backed up properly, a test restore from backup should be performed regularly. The schedule may vary by the chosen backup strategy, but no tape should be overwritten before a more recent backup has been properly tested and successfully restored.
- Check tablespace allocations in Oracle to ensure that enough disk space is available for database operations. Refer to the Oracle Database section of the Troubleshooting documentation (here) for details.
- Depending on the system load, archived log files can quickly accumulate and therefore, consume significant disk space. It is the responsibility of the system administrator to delete old archive log files.
- Gather statistics on indexes owned by the stepsys user. This is automatically done by a scheduled Oracle job, which is created as part of the STEP installation.
Database Maintenance
Database Maintenance related to performance is described in the STEP Database Maintenance Guide documentation.