URGENT: Hot Standby Graceful failover and failback

From: Leng Kaing <lkaing_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 08:58:21 -0700
Message-ID: <F001.002EAE0C.20010417081024@fatcity.com>

Good morning everyone,

HELP! HELP!!! It's very early in the morning and I'm still struggling with the Oracle Hot Standby - 8.0.5 and 8I. ARGH!

Ok, I got the failover going. I can activate the standby database and use it as a normal database. But when I try to turn it into a standby database again and then reactivate it again, it errors out on me. Oracle Support just tells me that I'm not supposed to use it this way. HUH? I'm not trying to put it back in standby mode so I can recover from the original primary database! I want to put it back in standby mode to similulate a total primary site loss. And always have a standby database to activate.

Ok, I may be rambling on a bit here. Very tired.

So here's what I've done so far:

create a hot standby from a primary database
activate the hot standby
shutdown the new primary and made a backup of the new primary database
restart the new primary, created a table and create a standby controlfile
shutdown the new primary
restore from backup created in step 3, and replaced the current control files with the standby controlfiles created from stop 4
mounted the database in standby mode again
tried to activate the new standby database but it failed with ORA-1152 and ORA-1110 complaining that the system.dbf is not restored from a sufficiently old backup.

Argh! How do we have a continuous failover and failback scenario? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I've just discovered Lawrence To's article on Graceful Switch Over and Switch back as well. The following from page 11 scares me:

"Graceful switchover and switchback are not possible when the production database's online redo logs are not accessible.

A graceful switchover and switch back is NOT possible whenever a production database or standby database executes one of the following:

alter database open resetlogs or
alter database activate standby database (which does an implicit resetlogs operation)"

HUH??? There are certainly times when we have to do a resetlogs. One of the problems our Unix boxes have at the moment is a redo log corruption so there are not choices but to resetlogs. So what does this all mean? That if we resetlogs we can't ever have continuous failover and failback?

ARGH!! What am I dealing with here!

I need a holiday from this crazy scenario!

Ok, please let me know if you've had any success with what I'm describing here. Am I aiming for the impossible? Surely not!

Thanks,

Leng.

Leng Kaing - lkaing_at_yahoo.com
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Received on Tue Apr 17 2001 - 10:58:21 CDT