Re: HA & Failover options

While there are variety of solutions out there only a few are likely to meet your needs and typically for top notch HA solutions you'll need to combine technologies. Finger pointing does indeed happen when you have multiple vendors so it's best to try to limit that number. The decision should take into consideration support services and references. Your best bet is to narrow the field and have the vendors come in and show you what they've got and make your decision based on what you see.

RAC and Data Guard may fit the bill. But like Orbitz and others have found out, RAC (and disk mirroring solutions) do you no good when you loose access to your disks or have corruption. And while Data Guard leaves you vulnerable each time you have a minor/major upgrade, it also gives you no failback plan during those times, locks you into an OS version and when used in a practical manner has inherent latency built in. And when you get past the marketing, it leaves you with the most expensive just-in-case paper weight in your company. Why not use the hardware investment to distribute the load or add value add-on services? Notwithstanding and given the appropriate scenario, and quite seriously, it may work for you. I know, I was among the first to implement this.

But Oracle's not so much focused on free database features these days. They're full-on going after the apps market and have their hands more than full with integrating their acquisitions of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and others. I hear some effort is still being put into RAC but don't look for much HA/DR beyond that - there's just no revenue in it. But it's created a market gap and that's why we see 3rd party vendors jumping in and filling it.

Bottom line: when it comes to databases there's only a few proven HA and DR solutions and it's big decision that can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Narrow it down and have the vendors prove they can do what they say they can do.

Best of luck!

-joe
Technology Evolution Solutions, LLC

DA Morgan wrote:
> debuzna_at_gmail.com wrote:
> > Questions:
> > a) For database which is the best cluster solution
> >
> > Have full standby instance for failover and reporting using GoldenGate
> > (goldengate.com). They not only go between different OS's but also
> > between different databases. Once you see how easy it is with the GUI
> > you'll not want to look at DataGuard or Streams again.
> >
> > -joe
>
> A remarkably bad idea compared with RAC and Data Guard unless you enjoy
> vendor finger-pointing exercises not to mention being unaware FAN it is
> not capable of responding to many real-world scenarios.
> --
> Daniel A. Morgan
> University of Washington
> damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
> (replace x with u to respond)
> Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
> www.psoug.org
Received on Wed Jun 07 2006 - 22:30:00 CDT