Re: Oracle SE and Standby database...

On 5/23/06, Carel-Jan Engel <cjpengel.dbalert_at_xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> Hi Dhimant,
>
> This is doable. I have done this several times, most of the times using
> scripts to forward redo and so on.
>

Indeed, and actually if you have the documentation from Oracle 7 days its how everyone used to do it.

Start defining the requirements for your database (together with
> business/mgmt). Recovery time required? Data loss allowed? and so on. What
> OS are you on?
>
> If you are on Windows you might look at Niall Litchfields scripts:
> http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com/scripts/dr/DR.zip
> Another option, for Solaris, HP-UX or Linux (not free) can be found at
> http://www.avisit.co.nz
>
> I must say that I haven't been able to test either of these. For dbvisit a
> trial license is available. Niall's work is licensed under the common
> creative license.
>

I think it is probably worth pointing out one problem with this approach, well illustrated by my scripts (which everyone is welcome to) tangentially related to testing. I haven't actually re-tested and verified the scripts above for about 18months. My best guess is that at the site involved no-one has. This is because I have left. Now the process and some of the decision points around failover and so on are documented, but you do need people on site who know how to do this stuff and have actually done it themselves. Recovering during a disaster is not the time you want to discover how DR works. Together with this I think it is probably worth thinking about how well support would support you in the use of your own scripts. In theory of course they would, but Oracle 7 is a long time ago now and when I went through this exercise I kept getting referred to DataGuard (and told that SE didn't support it :( ). I guess in summary what I am saying is that this sort of roll your own approach is riskier than the DataGuard approach - you have to do more stuff yourself (gap detection/nologging operations etc etc), you need people who know how your solution works and you need confidence in the supportability of the solution. However particularly if you go down the named user licensing route - we did as well figuring limited capacity in a disaster was OK - it may well be cheaper.

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info

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