Smart Database Technology

We had an interesting comment from a potential customer recently. Their impression was that Dbvisit was created specifically for Oracle 8i and 9i, at the stage when Data Guard was not yet fully “matured”.

This is not the reason that we created Dbvisit.

Dbvisit was created out of a desire to provide organizations with an easy to use, robust and secure Disaster Recovery solution. In particular we had those customers in mind who had Oracle Standard (SE) and Standard One (SE1) edition databases, and did not want to  upgrade to Enterprise Edition to make use of Data Guard. This has proven to be a successful strategy, as we are now trusted by companies in many parts of the world showing that Dbvisit is a world-class (and affordable) Oracle disaster recovery solution.

The advantages in using Dbvisit are:

1. Cost. You can save on license fees and maintenance fees using Dbvisit in primary and standby server environment, instead of upgrading to Enterprise Edition to utilise Data Guard.
2. Simplicity. Dbvisit is very simple to install and configure. It includes all the tools and utilities to effectively and easily manage the standby environment.
3. Fully featured. Dbvisit matches Data Guard on features such as graceful switchover, RAC, ASM and OMF. Out of the box Dbvisit also includes a number of features which Data Guard does not, like compression, monitoring and encryption for archive log transportation.
4. Automatic Standby Database creation. Dbvisit creates the standby database for you. Simple yet powerful.

For a comparison between Dbvisit and Data Guard please see here: http://www.dbvisit.com/dataguard.php.

Dbvisit works with all versions of Oracle. Starting from Oracle 8i onwards to the latest release of Oracle. In some cases Dbvisit will also work with Oracle 7.3. Dbvisit works with all editions of Oracle from Oracle XE, Standard One, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Some of our customers have a mix of Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition databases. Rather than use two different DR solutions, they have decided to standardize on Dbvisit for all their databases, so this includes using Dbvisit on Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. This strategy has been working very well for them.

For customers that are still running Oracle 8i and 9i databases (and there are still quite a few), Dbvisit can be used to protect those databases and future proof their investment as Dbvisit will work with all versions and features of Oracle when they decide to upgrade. Dbvisit works on Windows, Linux and Unix.

We have just released Dbvisit 5.2.24 for all platforms.

This version fixes an issue introduced in 5.2.22 when creating a standby database using a primary database that has a pfile only. Dbvisit does not pick up the correct pfile to transfer to the remote server. This has been fixed. Database using spfiles are not affected.

The full details of this release are:

New features:

1. If SUCCESS_MAILTO is set, then the Dbvisit daily heartbeat emails also go to this email address instead of ADMINS.

Fixes:

1. Dbvisit does not pick up the correct pfile to transfer to the remote server while creating standby database when the primary database does not use an spfile.

The latest version of Dbvisit can be downloaded from http://www.dbvisit.com/download.php

We have just released Dbvisit 5.2.22 for all platforms.

This version allows for a different Standby Database name (ORACLE_SID_DEST) and different admin directories during the creation of the standby database. It also has a number of fixes, a number of which are related to NLS settings of non English.

The full details of this release are:

New features:

1. Dbvisit now allows the Oracle admin directories on standby to be different from the primary database during creation of the Standby Database.

Fixes:

1. Dbvisit does not pick up the correct sequence for RAC on the standby when NLS is set to Spanish.
2. Fix issue with quotes around multiple email addresses: can’t extract address at ..
3. Improve obtaining asmcmd version for Windows.
4. Dbvisit does not pick up the archive log destination when NLS is set to Spanish during graceful switchover.
5. Create standby database may fail in Oracle 8i due to long tablespace names. This has been fixed.
6. Update check and add more tracing to determine if previous Dbvisit process is still running.
7. Update dbvisit help text.
8. If Dbvisit is unable to create Windows Oracle service during creation of standby database, Dbvisit will suggest to create the service manually.
9. Ignore the following SQLPLUS error message when creating Dbvisit repository using dbvisit_setup: Error accessing PRODUCT_USER_PROFILE
10. Dbvisit will detect if ORACLE_HOME_DR is set to a non-existing or not  valid directory on the standby server when creating a standby database and display a warning.
11. Dbvisit may not correctly detect the creation of Oracle Windows service in other languages during creation of standby database. This has been fixed.

The latest version of Dbvisit can be downloaded from http://www.dbvisit.com/download.php

We have released a new online service desk to further improve our support for Dbvisit. Tickets can be created online for any Dbvisit support issue. Tickets can be viewed and tracked at any stage to ensure progress is being made.

Any updates to the tickets will be automatically emailed to the person who created the ticked.

To create a new ticket in our service desk please go to: http://www.dbvisit.com/support.php