General DBA Support

The EAS DBA team is responsible for a very wide range of services, systems, applications that run on several platforms utilizing an assortment of technologies and vendor software.

The title of 'DBA' in some shops might only refer to the maintenance/upgrading, monitoring, performance tuning, backup/recovery, security of the database environments. Essentially, tasks that are centered exclusively around the database. An EAS DBA is responsible for all of the above as well as the following.

Within our in-house systems and services, our team maintains the IMS PSBs/ACBs/DBDs as well as all the IMS databases within each tier (DEV, TEST, PROD). For in-house Oracle PL/SQL applications, we manage and maintain the Oracle Database Server as well as the Oracle Application Server on all tiers. Many times we assist the various development teams with SQL, PLSQL and unix scripting needs to help support their applications. All PL/SQL application code changes are requested by development and deployed to the QA-tier and production by our team. For reporting needs against the Oracle databases, we have installed and manage/upgrade the Oracle Discoverer Servers. We are also involved in implementing the end-user access for many of these Discoverer Business Areas and the ongoing maintenance required for these Business Areas. The DBA team is often called in to assist in end-user desktop issues related to the use of the Discoverer reporting tool. For the RIAS data warehouse environments, we manage the Oracle Warehouse Builder product where we deploy mappings and manage changes related to any ETL (Extract Transformation & Load) process. Somewhat similar to that, we also manage and maintain the mappings between select IMS-segment fields and their corresponding Oracle table-columns using Informatica's Power Center/Exchange product. The team is also responsible for the management of a small number of SQLServer Applications that run on the Windows platform.

Rutgers has licensed a few ERP products. Oracle e-Business Suite was licensed and went live as RIAS-I. This suite requires significant maintenance and attention from our team. It involves many different technologies and our team manages and maintains the software on the Web/App (Apache & Oracle Forms) servers as well as the Concurrent Manager and the Oracle Database Server. Often, bugs require an e-Business patch to be applied to both the front-end (Web/App) and back-end (DB) servers. Additionally, we migrate/deploy any customizations to the controlled environments.

During RIAS-II, Oracle Portal and Oracle OID/IDM were implemented. Our team manages and maintains these services as well. To support the Universities Budget Office, Oracle's Hyperion product has been licensed and was implemented to production. The Hyperion environment consists of an entirely different technology stack and uses both an Oracle database for its metadata repository as well as a proprietary Essbase database (Extended Spread Sheet database). Our team manages and maintains these systems and services and is responsible for deployment of application developer modifications through the tiers.

RIAS-III (PeopleSoft) went live in 2011 and introduced new responsibilities and technologies for our team. Like e-Business and Hyperion, our team manages and maintains the Web/App servers as well as the Database servers to support PeopleSoft. The PeopleSoft product runs on Tuxedo, Microfocus COBOL, WebLogic & PeopleTools. The code is maintained using PeopleSoft Application Designer. DBA's use this tool as well to migrate developer changes through the controlled environments and on into the production environment. We are also familiar with PeopleSoft's Change Assistant utility in order to move 'bundles' (Patches) as well as Tax Updates through all of the dev, test and production environments. Occasionally, the DBA's are asked to deploy changes to various controlled environments using another PeopleSoft tool called Data Mover. File transfers are usually implemented in most systems as a way to share and propogate information from one system/application to another. The EAS DBA's are utilized in the setup and implementation of unix sftp scripts that put or get datasets to or from the EAS sftp server (occasionally using pgp/gpg encryption).

To help ensure that the Oracle data is backed up appropriately, the DBA's have setup and configured Oracle's RMAN (Recovery Manager) for all production Oracle databases. Our backup and recovery procedures are tested officially once a year during the yearly Disaster Recovery test (offsite) as well as throughout the year when we receive special requests from the project teams we support. From time to time, we are asked to clone one environment to another. Usually this involves using the Netbackup client tool and/or RMAN to copy/restore the source files off of the backup to the target location. To help manage and support the various Oracle environments, the DBA's have installed and configured Oracle's GRID Control, Oracle Enterprise Manager as well as the use of Quest's Toad DBA module for Oracle.