Personal Weblog of John Wood

Powershell is a fantastic tool to use for management of multiple computers. I have been slowly converting many of our administrative functions from a hodge-podge mixture of CMD, BAT, VPS, Python, and Perl scripts. One daily administrative talks is copying a variety of backups from a variety of Windows servers to our data ’warehouse’ where they are then copied to tape.

I recently found the “Jobs” cmdlets in Powershell V2.0. With “Jobs” you can asynchronously process multiple tasks (e.g. copying backups from many remote machines to data storage on the current local machine). In my case, running the copies synchronously results in the process spanning over to the next morning. Backups are stored daily. If a backup is taken on Wednesday, I can’t have it being stored in our warehouse under Thursday.

Continue reading ‘Asynchronous Processing using Powershell Jobs’ »

I recently installed GRID Control and while “playing around” with it, I discovered the fantastic capability to build a job once and deploy over many targets. I thought this is very cool after experiencing so many problems with Dbconsole.

I found you can create a Job with minimal effort and deploy it to various targets with minimal effort. Database backups fit this mold exceptionally well. In my shop, all of our backups are rather routine and all share common properties: complete backup, daily at 6PM. All of our databases are small enough for complete backups rather than incremental.

Continue reading ‘Easy Oracle Backup Deployment with Grid Control’ »