Short-term Answers Vs. The Correct Answer

Enterprise Manager does a LOT.  Sometimes it may do too much.  Customers on forums, on support or via email and social media may come to us asking how to address something they view as not working right and the truth is, we could simply answer their question, but they aren’t using the right tool to accomplish what they’re attempting.

The Export Feature in Enterprise Manager

A customer was frustrated as he was performing scheduled exports using the export utility that can be found under the Database, Schema drop down.  He wanted to perform these exports more than once per hour and was running into issues due to limitations in the functionality for how often and naming convention.  The scheduling mechanism quite as robust as he needed, so I understood his frustration, but I also realized that he was using the wrong tool for the job.  It seemed so natural to me that he should be using the EM Job System, but he really didn’t understand why he should use that when exports was right in the drop down.

Even though he can do the following:

1.  Export a schema or database
2. Schedule it to happen immediately or later and set it to repeat.
3. Allows for variable calls in the file naming
4. Simple GUI interface

Limitations Include:

• Was never meant to replace the job system, it just was enhanced and offered the ability to schedule and repeat jobs.
• Doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles you’d be given if you scripted with shell, perl or another scripting language from the command line.
• Has no success notification or alerting for failure in the job interface.
• No template like the Job Library.

It can be very confusing if you don’t know that we commonly have about 10 ways to skin a cat in Enterprise Manager and its important to review your requirements before choosing which one will meet those requirements, even if the naming convention tells you there is a specific feature for it.  An infrastructure feature may be the correct one that is built out to support advanced functionality for all that you have to accomplish vs. one specific requirement.

I’m a command line DBA, so I wasn’t even aware of the Export utility in the drop down menu.  I rarely, if ever, look at the database administration offerings.  I took the time this morning on one of my databases using the export utility in EM13c so that I knew what it offered, (along with what it didn’t…)

Please, don’t ask me if EM Express offers this.  I really couldn’t tell you, (inside joke… :))