Alan Owen

Information technology consultancy

Short-term assignment to set up a Cold Failover Cluster for a client of Oracle's

Built Production and multiple Non-Production Oracle database environments required to support the project. The environments were 3 node RAC clusters running on physical Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 servers while the test environments were all standalone Oracle Restart databases using RHEL 6.1 virtual environments. Oracle 12.1 was used for both the Grid Infrastructure and Databases. ASM was used as the volume manager. Data Guard in conjunction with Data Guard Broker provided a disaster recovery capability.

On project of Bank of Ireland compliant with the EU Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) initiative. This made use of RAC and cold failover clusters, scan listeners, ASM (with ACFS volumes for shared non-database files). Oracle 11.2.0.3 on AIX 6.1 LPARs was used first. Later Oracle 11.2.0.4 on AIX 7.1 LPARs was used. Then Oracle 12.1.0.2 started to be used for the Grid Infrastructure. Designed and tested an Oracle Clusterware compatible solution for implementing Tivoli Workload Scheduler Fault Tolerant Agents.

Brought in on a short-term basis to introduce new Oracle infrastructure prior to its implementation. The new infrastructure involved a 4-node extended Oracle 11.2 RAC cluster using Oracle 6.2 Linux servers and ASM as the volume manager. Implementation of the latest version of Grid Control (12.1.0.2). Tested and implemented RMAN backup and restore scripts that interfaced with Symantec Net Backup as the MML.

Transfer and upgrade of applications and databases from Aviva-owned to HP-owned hardware, with the infrastructure designed to HP standards. with optimized costs – so all the designs had to adhere to a standard format, the resources allocated were calculated in such a way that only appropriate (and not over-extravagant) provision was made, virtualization and shared services were to be used wherever possible etc. I was to focus on applications that used Oracle databases.

Responsible for building the Production and Preproduction RAC and Data Guard environments for Tesco Bank (a client of Cable and Wireless) to support the Genesys call centre application. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 servers were used. ASM was used as the volume manager. RMAN (with EMC Networker as the MML) was used for backups. The Production cluster used 4 nodes while Preproduction used 2. Each cluster contained 3 databases and RAC services were used to balance the load across the nodes.

Developed, tested and documented the standard build procedures for Oracle 11G databases running on HP-UX servers using ASM for storage, RAC as the high availability solution and Data Guard as the disaster recovery solution. Recovery Manager was used for backup and recovery and the details were stored in a Recovery Manager catalog. Production and preproduction databases were backed up to tape using HP.

Provided Oracle database consultancy to a DBA team, that supported the development of two border security projects (Schengen Information System 2 and the Visa Information System) for the European Commission. Both projects had a J2EE architecture with WebLogic as the application server. The physical data model was held in a Powerdesigner repository and this tool was used to generate DDL. Oracle Text context indexes were used by both projects to facilitate the ‘search engine’.

Responsible for project support for both the Oracle databases and application servers being used by IBM's client DEFRA about a complex, multi-tier new system called Genesis, which had become a core system for the new executive agency Natural England. The system was based on a J2EE architecture. IBM was responsible for hosting the Production and numerous test Genesis environments on Sun Solaris servers using an EMC CLARiiON SAN.

Joined a DBA support team that looked after the databases and application servers for blue chip clients, such as Vodafone, Scottish Water, and Nisa Today. The work included involvement with features like Data Guard and Advanced Replication on the database side and OC4J, Forms and Reports on the application server side.

Brought in to provide Oracle/Unix guidance to the council’s DBAs (both Development and Production). The council was transitioning from running DB2 databases on a mainframe to Oracle databases on HP-UX and IBM P-Series AIX servers. The middleware was Oracle’s Application Server (9ias) and Oracle Discoverer was being introduced into all user departments for MIS reporting.

Brought in to the DBA section of the IT Development department at Allied Irish Bank’s HQ to set from scratch an Oracle/Unix capability. Produced best practice documentation for the design and implementation of Oracle databases