Re: 24x7 database

Bill Hayden wrote in message <3517FBA0.61895F33_at_edwardjones.com>...

>Research doing hot backups. Insist on a test machine for you to practice
>backup and recovery procedures. Read everything you can and try any
>situations that you can think of.

Er.. one company insisted that our hardware test was not valid. I mean, we were stress testing the hardware by having a couple of dancing bellygram girls on it. What's so wrong with that? ;-)

Seriously though, I agree whole heartedly with Bill. You need to test and test and test again. And try every single weird situation you can think off (except the dancing girl thing of course). AND (a big and), the same apply to the hardware and operating system. It's of no use to have a rock solid implementation of a 24x7 Oracle database on a piece of hardware that does not cut it, or on top of an operating system that has been installed "out-of-the-box" without hardening it after installation.

A word about hardware. Many of the "modern" h/w configs allow for high availibility. For example, on a MPP when a node goes down, the other takes over the disks of that node. Or if one cell crashes (taking some disks and a couple of nodes with it), the mirror for those disks sitting on another cell kicks in. My advice is to speak to the hardware vendor about configuring/buying the hardware for high availibility. Sure it may be expensive, but you may well stand the change to loose a -lot- more when the hardware falls over.

>We run 24X7 with very little down time, mostly scheduled for software
>upgrades OS maintenance.

Ditto. The only time we need to bounce Oracle is when the customer goes into a production weekend. It's an effective method of kicking the users off, and it's a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that production is running on newly started "clean" instances. :-)

regards,
Billy Received on Thu Mar 26 1998 - 00:00:00 CST