Smart Database Technology

We confirmed yesterday with Thomas Salmen, CTO at Orcon*, that he’ll be speaking at our Disaster Recovery Strategies for Oracle Standard Edition breakfast seminar on 27th April in Auckland.

Thomas will cover the thinking behind Orcon’s disaster recovery strategy and the steps they took to implement their solution.

This breakfast is one of two FREE seminars held in Auckland and Wellington on the 27th & 28th respectively. Delivered in partnership with Oracle NZ and supported by the New Zealand Oracle User Group (NZOUG), the topics covered include:

• how to develop your DR strategy
• database backup and recovery solutions available to Oracle users
• Oracle Enterprise and Standard Edition commercials
• 3rd party and cloud leveraged DR solutions
• solution cost profiles

The seminars aim to arm IT Managers, Senior DBAs and Architects in businesses that rely on Oracle to store their data, with the information they need to ensure their data is always protected and available.

For more information and to register for this event go to our Disaster Recovery Strategies for Oracle Standard Edition page.

* Orcon uses Dbvisit as part of their DR infrastructure.

We recently carried out some research among some of our clients in order to gain a better insight into the acceptable levels of data loss in a standby environment. We asked two questions:

1. How often is Dbvisit scheduled on your primary server. For example is this every 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes?
2. What type of database is Dbvisit running on? I.e. OLTP, Data Warehouse  or other?

We got a great response and would like to thank everyone who participated.

The responses (see chart below) showed that Dbvisit is scheduled on average every 12 minutes with the shortest interval reported as 2 minutes

Dbvisit is actually capable of providing a minimum of just 60 seconds data loss although this needs to be considered against how critical the database in question is and the possible subsequent impact on database performance. We would love to hear from any of our customers who schedule Dbvisit every 60 seconds or who have any queries surrounding Dbvisit scheduling, so we better understand your data availability needs.

We also found that OLTP databases are by far the most common, outnumbering all others by 2:1.

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)