Oracle Essentials, 4th Edition

Chapter 11. Oracle and High Availability

The data stored in your databases is one of your organization’s most valuable assets. Protecting and providing timely access to this data when it is needed for business decisions is crucial for any Oracle site.

As a DBA, system administrator, or system architect, you’ll probably use a variety of techniques to ensure that your data is adequately protected from catastrophe. Of course, implementing proper backup operations is the foundation of any availability strategy, but there are other ways to avoid a variety of possible outages that could range from simple disk failures to a complete failure of your primary site.

Computer hardware is, by and large, extremely reliable, and that can tempt you to postpone thinking about disaster recovery and high availability. Most software is also very reliable, and the Oracle database protects the integrity of the data it holds even in the event of software failure. However, hardware and software will fail occasionally. The more components involved, the greater the likelihood of downtime at the worst time.

The difference between inconvenience and disaster is often the presence or absence of adequate recovery plans. This chapter should help you understand all of the options available when deploying Oracle so you can choose the best approach for your site.

With Oracle, you can guarantee that your precious data is highly available by leveraging built-in capabilities such as instance recovery or options such as ...