Re: Oracle Replication

Greetings,

If you are serious about replication, you should look at Oracle Streams and third party replication tools, in addition to the Oracle feature that has replication in its name "Advanced Replication" (which I consider legacy, but still has its place). I think that if you are starting fresh you should give all the options a very serious analysis stage including testing if possible as each has critical make-or-break strengths and weaknesses. Acceptable datatypes, huge performance differences, additional functionalities that can make replication management much easier, etc.

If you are going the way of any kind of replication, expect there to be a real learning curve both before you go into production and over the first year of production. Also expect to work with development and others closely to get the failover/switchover capability to work well.

The danger with depending on RAC alone is, of course, if the disks go. No matter how many server nodes you have the disks are a single point-of-failure. Raid 0+1 is no guarantee you won't lose your disks as I have seen from time to time. So you might want to look at Data Guard, too.

If you plan to do Data Guard or RAC, seriously consider upgrading things to 10gR2 first. For example 10g Data Guard has a feature called real time apply that can seriously reduce recovery time.

Before jumping into any option, be sure that you understand in detail how the applications in question are expected to failover (disaster) or switchover (maintenance).

Oh, and creating some kind of availability architecture is really worth it, no matter how hard or complex if your organization values uptime. It's a huge load off your back and a great value to the organization having somewhere to switchover to.

Hope that is of any help,

xneilx.xisenbergx_at_xgmailx.xcomx
(remove x's for the address) Received on Mon Feb 13 2006 - 18:11:20 CST