Question – How to determine if a database is in use.
Now that may appear to be a *newbie stupid *question but let me elaborate.
We are a global company with 500+ offices along with about 6 largish
datacentres around the globe. We have over 1000 instances running in
various capacities on around 260 servers (some physical, some Virtual) with
a 60% Windows, 25% Sun and the remaining Linux. Some of our larger ones are
generating 70gb a day in redo, while others barely kick over 2mb a day.
They range in versions from (embarrassed to say but its starts with a 7) to
12.1.0.2 EE. We do run a Global installation of Cloud Control 12.1.0.4 and
pretty much all databases are in there.
With the ever present threat of audits from that magical team called LMS we
are trying to identify those instances that are not being used, or haven’t
been used in 6+ months with the goal to archive and then promptly
decommission the database and uninstall the binaries. New databases are
coming online weekly, but it appears that the business has a difficulty in
telling anyone that they are not used anymore. They don’t realise or care,
that for every instance, there is a cost, whether it be CPU, memory,
storage, tapes, my time and the big costs of licences.
So, given that I have 1000+ instances, how would you identify which of
those haven’t been used for 6+ months?
My initial thoughts
1) I’ve used Cloud Control repository to mine the wonderful data and
got a list of databases ordered by redo generation, but just because a
database generates 2mb a day does not mean that its not being used. So
while it may highlight low use databases, its by no mean perfect.
2) Parse the classic listener.log file using SED to strip the noise
and then grep on the SID and see what users are connecting, and what dates
they connected. This sounds like what I’m after thinking there might be a
better way like creating an external table on the 11g diag listener.xml
files and using some magic query ? Anyone done that and like to share?
3) There is an option going forward to create a few tables and create
a custom login trigger to record logins, but obviously this does require
some work, a few RFC’s and 6+ months to get the data.
4) Then again, there is probably some out of the box auditing that can
be turned on that will have this, but again a few (lots) of RFC and then
work out how to query this audit data. Actually does the seeded DBSNMP have
read access into the audit trails? As I can generate a global Tnsnames.ora
file that lists all our servers.
5) Is there anything in the Cloud Control repo that has this
information?
My perfect solution would be use the info in Cloud Control to
automate/script this and was wondering if anyone had any insights.
