Dbvisit – Standby Database Technology Blog

Oracle Open World 2009 is scheduled for October 11-15 in San Francisco.

I will be presenting 2 papers at Oracle Open World.

This is my first time at OOW and I am very much looking forward to it.
It will be a great chance to meet new people and to catch up with friends and customers.

I will be presenting the following 2 papers:

1) How to Create a Technical Disaster Recovery Implementation Plan.

A technical disaster recovery implementation plan involves the actual implementation of the hardware and software at the disaster recovery location. It ensures that there are no surprises when building the disaster recovery servers and that all critical systems and their components have been accounted for. This session focuses on Oracle-centric applications in the UNIX/Linux environment.
When: Monday Oct 12 16:00 – 17:00, Moscone South, Room 270

2) Perl:DBA’s and Developers best (forgotten) friend.

This session reintroduces Perl as a language of choice for DBAs and developers for developing a range of programs and scripts. Discover what makes Perl so successful and why it is so versatile. Perl can automate all those manual tasks, and it is truly platform-independent. It may not be in the limelight like other languages, but it is a remarkable language for development and is still very current with ongoing development. Oracle and VMware still use it as part of their latest software releases.
When: Tuesday Oct 13 16:00 – 17:00, Moscone South, Room 270

If you are attending OOW and are interested in these topics, please come along.

If you are one of our Dbvisit customers or just want catch up with me during OOW – please tweet me @dbvisit or send me an email. I am looking forward to meeting with you.

Dbvisit 5.2.16 has been released for all platforms.

This is an exciting release as we now have the ability for graceful switchover for RAC and ASM databases. Many companies have been requesting this feature and we are pleased that it is now available.

The roles between a primary RAC node and the standby database can be switched and be switched back with no dataloss. The RAC database will become a single instance database and the other RAC nodes will be shutdown during switchover. However after the switchover the database can be converted back to the original RAC database again very simply.

The standby database creation has also been improved with now a lot more checking on the standby database to see if the correct directories exist.

When Dbvisit detects an error, the Dbvisit trace files is now automatically attached to the email, making the process to send the trace file to support very easy.

The full details of the features are:
New features:

1. Graceful Switchover for ASM and RAC. RAC database will become a single
   instance database during switchover. After switchover database can be
   converted to a RAC database again.
   Note: The Oracle ASM instance needs to be version 11gR1 or higher. The Oracle
   database itself can be Oracle 10g or higher.

2. Upgrade Bitvise WinSSHD to 4.28 and Tunnelier to 4.29 for Windows only.
3. Improve error message when standby fails to start during standby database creation.
4. Add message to remove old archives when activating standby database.
5. Add smtp authentication and other advanced Mail settings.
   See MAILCFG_AUTH_USER and MAILCFG_AUTH_PASSWD settings.

6. Attach trace files to email when Dbvisit errors to forward to Dbvisit support. Set filesize limit of 768000 bytes for attachments.
7. Database files are tested for correct location during creation of standby database. If not correct then user is asked to rename them.
8. Standby redo log names are tested for correct location during graceful switchover.
9. Add variable SEND_MAIL_FLAG_DR to turn off mailing from standby server.
10. Add ability to manually email trace files as attachments with option:
    dbv_functions -m tracefilename

Fixes:

1. Check if Oracle database admin directories exists before creating the standby database.
2. Fixed Dbvisit repository create error in Oracle 8i.
3. Add check for ORA-00344: unable to re-create online log when activating standby database.

Dbvisit can be downloaded from our website http://www.dbvisit.com.