Oracle DUPLICATION alternatives for source and two systems !!!

[Henrique Silva_3]

We are not in production yet, but I have a conundrum here.

I have a production box, that do not have a DRP solution in place yet. We looked at MCSG with CA, but it is very costly, so, I was thinking about simply setting up a standby DB on the other end, since the change over from the continental clustering would have to be manual anyways.

The problem that I have is that I was planning to setup a standby DB already, from the production box, to be used by the Data Warehouse as the source, instead of going directly on the production box.

A solution there, would be to use BCVs to get the data from the production box over to the source DW box, but this would be done once or twice a day, and use the standby for the DRP box.

No oracle replication will be used here. No need to complicate things even more.

So, what else I could do to get the DW and DRP scenarios in place, without introducing more complexity into the scene ?

BCVs for the DW and standby for the DRP would work, but we need to get BCVs in place.

There is such a thing of standby of a standby ?
I do not think so.

Also, I guess we could use a snapshot on the DW and use standby on the DRP box !!! Maybe this could be the best solution.

Ideas ?

Henrique Silva

[Steven E. Protter]

1) You use too many abbreviations for me to fully understand your question.

Yet in a silly mood, I try anyway.

We have three databases on our production system.

One is in use, and the other is off cold, alternate. The third is a training db.

We occaisionally use the alternate db to replicate all or part of the production db and then ship it off to development or training.

We do this during our cold backup window, we "clone" the db, using os copy.

As long as you don't mind the data warehouse being a day old, you can just as easily take your cold backup to another machine.

If its a failover system for a OLRT(online real time) transaction database, it will be useless as a failover, because the data won't be current.

If its a failover for a datawarehouse, it will work just fine.

Standby is what you make of it. To really understand your question though, I need some of the abbreviations translated and an understanding of this question:

What kind of database do you want to have a standby for?

OLRT?
Warehouse?
Something else?

P

[Henrique Silva_3]

DRP - Disaster Recovery ( this is the system that needs to be current )

DW, might not need to be as current as production.

BCV - Business Copy ( used to get an instant copy of your datafiles on a SAN environment ).

We will NOT have many oportunities for a cold backup here. Maybe once a month. With BCVs, you can simply do a hot backup and move this over to the DW box. We could either bring it up with the same SID name there, or change it to something else. This could also be used for backing up the datafiles into tape, using Omniback, without having to do it online on the production box, keeping the performance going.

The DRP box, which might located about 2,000 miles away, needs to have current data, and since we are not using oracle replication ( no need for such complexity ) and CA ( continuous access is too expensive ), I was thinking of using the standby on that box. There are a couple third party apps that I could use here, to automate the whole thing, or I could write my own redo log file transfer mechanism. I guess it is a matter of having the time to do so or not.

In any case, since I was going to originally use the standby on the DW box, since I did not want to play with BCVs, standby was not a problem, but the moment that the DRP box came into the picture, then we had to re-evaluate here.

I think I will end up using BCVs between production and DW and standby between production and DRP, but would like to hear some other ideas, if anybody has them !!!

Thanks,

Henrique Silva

[Julio Yamawaki]

Henrique:

If you want to have a standby DB to prevent from hardware and software failures, you can simply have a weekly full copy of the Database (in this case you can user BCV or something like or a "normal" full copy of the database )cold or hot).
To keep your database up to date, you can simply apply the archivelogs (daily, hourly, ...).