Why You Should Combine Your OEM Repository and SQL Developer

Why do we love data? Because it brings us INFORMATION, a central element in today’s computer-driven world. One of the countless sources of data is an OEM repository. Gathered metrics placed together for monitored targets can become priceless in a DBA’s hands. Moreover, that information can be presented to other technical and business groups for a wide analysis.

Thanks to SQL Developer, converting DATA to INFORMATION is easy nowadays. The tool is updated with new features and enhances existing ones like reporting. The recently issued SQL Developer 4.0 Early Adopter 1 has new types of graphs and an improved reporting drill down feature, not to mention the big list of other features described by Jeff Smith and on the download page.

Even though you can do reporting in OEM itself and develop your own application to view repository data with Oracle APEX, developing reports to present OEM repository data is much easier in SQL Developer. Moreover, these reports can be shared between DBAs and used with different OEM repository databases without any installation in a database. SQL Developer can even export reports to dynamic HTML and PDFs so you can easily send them to others.

Furthermore, command line tool, a feature included in the latest version, can automate the report execution. DBAs can then have many reports ready for analysis in the morning and know how databases behave overnight.

To help manage several hundred databases, I have built many reports using binds and drill down features, as well as the new “Combination” charts. Here is a video in which I “drill” down from groups to particular metrics gathered for targets in the OEM repository, and a zipped XML (oem_analysis) for the reports attached to the blog post.

I have also created a report (load_activity) based on the metric ‘Wait Bottlenecks’ and the cpu_count of Oracle Database, which shows the top loaded database in the last day. Reviewing it periodically can help identify issues and see load patterns for supported databases.

And these are only a few things you can do when combining SQL Developer’s functionality and data from an OEM repository.

You will LOVE it!

Have a good day!