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Logical vs. Physical Standby databases
Submitted By Rama Subramoniam

A Quick Primer

Standby databases, in a nutshell, acts as a failover for our mission critical production databases. When production database crashes, applications can quickly switchover to the stand by databases.

Oracle provides two types of standby databases:

1. Physical Standby Database

Standby database is called “physical” if the physical structure of stand by exactly matches with stand by structure. Archived redo log transferred from primary database will be directly applied to the stand by database.

Often, we want our PL/SQL code to output messages (using DBMS_OUTPUT) to debug a problem. This is mostly required during development, but may also come in handy if a program misbehaves in production. If the testing of your application is thorough, then you should never have an issue in the production environment. But, we all know that there are instances where we do want debug messages even in the production environment. Before Oracle 10g R2, this could not be done dynamically.

Indexes are used to speed up data access by SQL statements, but there is no free lunch as each additional index increases:

• The time needed to perform DML (Insert/Update/Delete) operation on the table (because additional index entries must be updated).
• The enqueue time (during DML the corresponding index entries are locked decreasing the ability of parallel updates and causing transactions, issued by another session(s) to wait.
• The generated UNDO volume.
• The disk space needed to store the index information.

I recently stumbled across a sample chapter of Expert Oracle PL/SQL where the authors (Ron Hardman and Michael McLaughlin) mentioned that OraFAQ.com is a good place to post Oracle questions.

LOBs, or Large OBjects, are Oracle's preferred way of handling and storing non-character data, such as mp3s, videos, pictures, etc., and long character data. Binary large objects, or BLOBs, and character large objects, or CLOBs, can store up to terabytes of data - much more than the paltry 4000 bytes permitted in a varchar2 column. LOBs and CLOBs offer DBAs and developers great flexibility and storage space; the tradeoff is that they're a bit clunkier to handle.

The first thing to know about LOBs is that there are two basic types: external LOBs, which are stored outside the database, and internal LOBs, which are stored in the database. External LOBs are of the BFILE datatype; essentially, the database stores a pointer to the LOB's location in the file system. As such, they can't participate in transactions, and access is read-only. This article will deal with internal LOBs.

Flashback Recovery is a new enhancement to the 10g database for the DBA's toolkit. Effectively, it's an "Oh shit!" protection mechanism for DBAs as it reduces recovery time from hours to minutes. Ask any DBA about the main cause of application outage - other than hardware failure - and the answer will be "human error". Such errors can result in logical data corruption and can bring down the complete system. Part of being human is making mistakes. Without advance planning, these errors are extremely difficult to avoid, and can be very difficult to recover from. Typical user-errors may include the accidental deletion of valuable data, deleting the wrong data, or dropping the wrong table.

Some DBAs complain that Oracle's pre-10g job queue interface is lacking. Unlike cron or Windows Scheduler, pre-10g Oracle doesn't provide a mechanism to schedule jobs to run twice a week, on the first of the month, etc.

In 10gR1, Oracle introduced the Scheduler, a new way to schedule jobs to run from within Oracle. The old DBMS_JOB mechanism is still there, but the Scheduler has several advantages over its predecessor. This article will take a quick look at those advantages and discuss transitioning from DBMS_JOB/ DBA_JOBS to the Scheduler. My next article will take a more in-depth look at some of the Scheduler's features.