Administering your Oracle DB instance - Amazon Relational Database Service

Administering your Oracle DB instance

Following are the common management tasks that you perform with an Amazon RDS DB instance. Some tasks are the same for all RDS DB instances. Other tasks are specific to RDS for Oracle.

The following tasks are common to all RDS databases, but Oracle has special considerations. For example, connect to an Oracle Database using the Oracle clients SQL*Plus and SQL Developer.

Task area Relevant documentation

Instance classes, storage, and PIOPS

If you are creating a production instance, learn how instance classes, storage types, and Provisioned IOPS work in Amazon RDS.

RDS for Oracle instance classes

Amazon RDS storage types

Multi-AZ deployments

A production DB instance should use Multi-AZ deployments. Multi-AZ deployments provide increased availability, data durability, and fault tolerance for DB instances.

Configuring and managing a Multi-AZ deployment

Amazon VPC

If your AWS account has a default virtual private cloud (VPC), then your DB instance is automatically created inside the default VPC. If your account doesn't have a default VPC, and you want the DB instance in a VPC, create the VPC and subnet groups before you create the instance.

Working with a DB instance in a VPC

Security groups

By default, DB instances use a firewall that prevents access. Make sure that you create a security group with the correct IP addresses and network configuration to access the DB instance.

Controlling access with security groups

Parameter groups

If your DB instance is going to require specific database parameters, create a parameter group before you create the DB instance.

Working with parameter groups

Option groups

If your DB instance requires specific database options, create an option group before you create the DB instance.

Adding options to Oracle DB instances

Connecting to your DB instance

After creating a security group and associating it to a DB instance, you can connect to the DB instance using any standard SQL client application such as Oracle SQL*Plus.

Connecting to your Oracle DB instance

Backup and restore

You can configure your DB instance to take automated backups, or take manual snapshots, and then restore instances from the backups or snapshots.

Backing up and restoring

Monitoring

You can monitor an Oracle DB instance by using CloudWatch Amazon RDS metrics, events, and enhanced monitoring.

Viewing metrics in the Amazon RDS console

Viewing Amazon RDS events

Log files

You can access the log files for your Oracle DB instance.

Monitoring Amazon RDS log files

Following, you can find a description for Amazon RDS–specific implementations of common DBA tasks for RDS Oracle. To deliver a managed service experience, Amazon RDS doesn't provide shell access to DB instances. Also, RDS restricts access to certain system procedures and tables that require advanced privileges. In many of the tasks, you run the rdsadmin package, which is an Amazon RDS–specific tool that enables you to administer your database.

The following are common DBA tasks for DB instances running Oracle:

  • Diagnostic tasks

    Listing incidents

    Amazon RDS method: rdsadmin.rdsadmin_adrci_util.list_adrci_incidents

    Oracle method: ADRCI command show incident

    Listing problems

    Amazon RDS method: rdsadmin.rdsadmin_adrci_util.list_adrci_problem

    Oracle method: ADRCI command show problem

    Creating incident packages

    Amazon RDS method: rdsadmin.rdsadmin_adrci_util.create_adrci_package

    Oracle method: ADRCI command ips create package

    Showing trace files

    Amazon RDS method: rdsadmin.rdsadmin_adrci_util.show_adrci_tracefile

    Oracle method: ADRCI command show tracefile

You can also use Amazon RDS procedures for Amazon S3 integration with Oracle and for running OEM Management Agent database tasks. For more information, see Amazon S3 integration and Performing database tasks with the Management Agent.