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Oracle® Database High Availability Best Practices
10g Release 2 (10.2)

Part Number B25159-01
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1 Introduction to High-Availability Best Practices

This chapter describes how using Oracle high-availability best practices can increase availability to the Oracle database as well as the entire technology stack. This chapter contains the following topics:

1.1 Oracle Database High-Availability Architecture

Choosing and implementing the architecture that best fits the availability requirements of a business can be a daunting task. This architecture must encompass appropriate redundancy, provide adequate protection from all types of outages, ensure consistent high performance and robust security, while being easy to deploy, manage, and scale. Needless to mention, this architecture should be driven by well-understood business requirements. Choosing and implementing a high-availability architecture is covered in Oracle Database High Availability Overview.

Before using the best practices presented in this book, your organization should have already chosen a high-availability architecture for your database as described in Oracle Database High Availability Overview. If you have not already done so, then refer to that document to learn about the high-availability solutions that Oracle offers for Oracle Database before proceeding with this book.

1.2 Oracle Database High-Availability Best Practices

To build, implement and maintain a high-availability architecture, a business needs high-availability best practices that involve both technical and operational aspects of its IT systems and business processes. Such a set of best practices removes the complexity of designing a high-availability architecture, maximizes availability while using minimum system resources, reduces the implementation and maintenance costs of the high-availability systems in place, and makes it easy to duplicate the high-availability architecture in other areas of the business. An enterprise with a well-articulated set of high-availability best practices that encompass high-availability analysis frameworks, business drivers and system capabilities, will enjoy an improved operational resilience and enhanced business agility.

Building, implementing, and maintaining a high-availability architecture for Oracle Database using high-availability best practices is the purpose of this book. By using the Oracle Database high-availability best practices described in this book, you will be able to:

1.3 Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) is an Oracle best practices blueprint based on proven Oracle high-availability technologies and recommendations. The high-availability best practices described in this book make up one of several components of MAA. MAA involves high-availability best practices for all Oracle products across the entire technology stack—Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Applications, Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle Grid Control.

Some of the key features of MAA include:

For more information on MAA and documentation on best practices for all components of MAA, visit the MAA web site at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/htdocs/maa.htm

1.4 Operational Best Practices

One of the best ways to reduce downtime is incorporating operational best practices. You can often prevent problems and downtime before they occur by rigorously testing changes in your test environment, following stringent change control policies to guard your primary database from harm, and having a well-validated repair strategy for each outage type.

A monitoring infrastructure such as Grid Control is essential to quickly detect problems. Having an outage and repair decision tree as well as an automated or automatic repair facility reduces downtime by eliminating or reducing decision and repair times.

The following is a list of key operational practices:

See Also:

Chapter 4, "Managing Outages" for more information on repair strategies and practices