Dbvisit – Standby Database Technology Blog

How much does 30 minutes of down time cost your business?

Maintenance overheads aside, think about the opportunity costs in lost productivity. Now imagine a 16 hour downtime. Will your company operations be hurt because of inaccessibility to critical data? In the US, 43% companies never reopen after a major disaster*, and only 7% survive for an additional 5 years**.

While we cannot control external forces – natural, human or technical; we can control the impact they have on our businesses. No company is immune to such catastrophes. Companies are protecting their data against disruptions more seriously today with contingency plans and standby servers, because of our excessive dependencies on machines.

Time or data loss has huge costs in terms of overheads and lost opportunities. Loosing integral data to disasters not only impacts the security and finances of your business, it jeopardizes its existence completely.

So the question is, how prepared are you to face such unforeseen situations? Do you have the peace of mind that no matter what happens, your company’s data will be protected and your business will continue without stalling even for a moment?

Your business success, bottom line, and growth depend on how prepared and secure your systems and processes are at all times.

You won’t ever have to recover from disasters, if you are ready for them.

(* US Small Business administration)
(** US Bureau of Labour)

We are now an official Oracle Partner.

We are very pleased that Dbvisit is bundled together with software from major vendors to offer their clients complete protection in terms of Oracle disaster recovery, data recoverability and backup protection.

Microlistics is a successful privately owned Australian Company focused on delivering Warehouse Management systems throughout the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions. We are proud to be one of their technology partners.

In North America Fiserv have bundled Dbvisit with their Credit Union platform. One-third of US credit unions depend on Fiserv to deliver technologies that serve as the backbone for their daily operations.

Alcatel-Lucent have bundled Dbvisit with their Next Generation Operational Maintenance Centre. Their senior software developer has this to say about Dbvisit: “The solution takes a complex problem and distils it down to reliable, cost effective, and easy to use product.”

Software vendors are starting to realise the importance of offering a complete solution to their customers which includes disaster recovery. Dbvisit is seen as a best-of-breed solution to offer Oracle disaster recovery.

A Standby Database is a duplicate copy of an operational database on another server. The standby database is being kept up to date by a replication mechanism that ensures each transaction that is applied to the operational or primary database is also applied to the standby database. In most cases there is some lag between when the transaction is applied to the primary database and when it is applied to the standby database. This is typically between 1 and 10 minutes which is acceptable for most businesses.

A standby database is far superior to a normal backup as it is instantly available in the event of a disaster or failure. To restore a backup takes time, and during the restore time the system is not available. A restore may also cause too much impact on other systems. With a standby database there is nothing to restore in the event of a disaster or failure as the standby database is always available. It is possible to switch applications over to the standby database in a matter of minutes to allow business continuity.

There are several replication mechanisms to keep a standby database up to date:

1. Physical Standby using redo or archive logs
2. Logical Standby using SQL
3. Oracle replication using streams

Physical standby is the most commonly used for disaster recovery or failure. Conceptually the mechanism for keeping the standby database updated is not difficult, but putting this into practice to get a robust solution is complex and requires a lot of work. The reason is that there are so many things that can go wrong at each step of the process and you have to ensure that the standby database keeps up to date no matter what. And if it is not keeping up to date then alerts should be raised. The last thing you want to happen is that the standby database is old, when you need it most.

We have seen instances where the companies have used home grown solutions to keep the standby database up to date, but when the DBA left that wrote them, the new DBA’s were too scared to touch it incase it broke. So no DR test was even done. In the case of an actual hard disk failure, the DBA recommended to restore from backup, rather than switch to the standby database, because they were not sure if it was kept up to date and how the process could be reversed once the primary server was operational again. At another company, the standby database was last updated 2 years ago!

The standby database can be used for other purposes other than just for disaster recovery:

1. Reporting database. READ ONLY queries can be performed on the standby database to offset loads from the primary database.
2. Shadow environment which can be used to investigate issues like database bugs or inconsistencies that arise on the primary database and the primary database can continue to run risk free while the issues are investigated on the shadow database.
3. Capturing snapshots for batch transactions (point in time). The standby database can be used for rollback purposes in case of errors during batch processing.
4. Perform backup on the standby database rather than the primary database to offset loads to the primary server. Backups can be done in the middle of the day to ensure staff are available to resolve any backup issues.

Oracle licenses
You will need a full Oracle license for the standby database. This needs to be the same metric as the primary database. So if you primary database is Enterprise Edition, then your standby database also needs to be Enterprise Edition. If the primary database is licensed per CPU, then the standby database aslo needs to be licenced per CPU.

We are very pleased to have SETRA Conseil as a Dbvisit reseller in France.  SETRA Conseil have a very experienced team of Oracle professionals with clients in Nice, Marseille, Montpellier, Lyon, Grenoble and  Paris plus Monaco. They are very experienced with Oracle Disaster Recovery, Standby Database, Oracle RAC and general Oracle consulting and can offer local Dbvisit support.

Welcome aboard.