Koji Woo

One last day...

The time has come, the last day with a customer. The old environment was no longer sufficient, often malfunctions and poor performance. A new environment had to be installed. This environment resides on two Oracle Database Appliance Servers. A Primary environment with a Standby environment at a different geographic location, equipped with Oracle Dataguard with MaxAvailability as protection mode.

The customer is a partnership that provides IT services for a number of municipalities. We had to migrate a hundred production databases, an equally large number of test databases and standby databases. The Weblogic environment is placed on an Oracle VM ware cluster that is also set up by DBA.nl.

In this project it was important to meet the deadline and we succeeded. Still, it was occasionally exciting, a server that did not restart via ILOM. Which meant that a colleague had to drive to the data center at ten o’clock in the evening to press the reset button. Furthermore, the moment that no driving licenses could be requested for a day because no Network Access Control List came with the import. In short, incidents that can occur in any project, are difficult for the customer and must be resolved.

The setup of the weblogic environment went well. At the customer, they had many different applications with many different web and application servers. The databases also had many links with each other. Due to the extensive experience DBA.nl has with municipalities and the specific applications, we had few questions outstanding. This saves a lot of time. Furthermore, due to performance tuning and the correct parameter settings in the databases, they did not have to purchase additional Oracle Enterprise Edition licenses, which was expected beforehand. As a result, the project was delivered well within budget.

I was able to perform this work easily because at DBA.nl I was given the opportunity to become an Oracle Certified Weblogic Implementation Specialist. At DBA.nl you get many opportunities to further develop yourself. You will receive a training plan that will help you become a more complete DBA. My colleagues at DBA.nl make a great team and a good sounding board. You can always find an expert in a field in which you are less familiar. Together we can handle all Oracle issues. It helped me a lot during the project.

This last day is therefore relatively easy. Only migrate two production databases and create their standby databases. Now put the databases in our CMDB. That’s our Apex webpage where our customers’ servers and databases are located. The nice thing about my work at DBA.nl is the intensive contact with the customer. You get to know each other well and you often see each other again during regular maintenance work.