Where to Go from Here

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The downtime scenarios that we have tried to illustrate in this chapter are but the tip of the iceberg. We wanted to show you that there are common, everyday situations that can be fixed using new functionality in Oracle Database 10g. Often, this is functionality that you already have at your fingertips and can leverage right now, with just a few steps that we outline in the following chapters.

We also wanted to show you some of the more disruptive events that can immobilize a database: user errors, such as a truncated table, or a hardware failure. These types of events happen less frequently, but the outage can be extremely long without careful planning that accounts for the possibility. From RAC to Flashback, careful planning and forethought will guide you through these disruptions.

Protect Yourself Against Disaster with Data Guard

Oracle Data Guard offers the most effective protection against complete site failure, with real-time data push from the primary database to the standby database. Data Guard allows you to activate an exact copy of the primary database in just a few minutes (or seconds), so that the outage is almost unnoticeable. It can be configured in many different ways to meet the business demands you may have. The standby database can be used as a reporting database, for taking backups of the production database, or even as a failover site during massive system reconfiguration at the primary site. For a complete rundown of the flexibility and usability of Oracle Data Guard, see Chapter 7.

Even less predictable, and less frequent, is the complete loss of a system due to natural disaster or site network outage. In situations where the entire database is lost and cannot be quickly restored, there are important questions that begin to circulate, and some of them have to do with who's at fault for the lack of a disaster plan. Oracle Data Guard offers one of the most advanced disaster-proofing solutions on the market.

So, now that you've explored just a few of the situations that might cause an outage, its time to explore the technologies that can prevent (or significantly reduce) those disruptive downtimes.

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