GotoDBA Database Thoughts,Infrastructure OGB Appreciation Day – Standby Database

OGB Appreciation Day – Standby Database

It’s this time of the year again. If you don’t know what OTN/ODC/OGB appreciation day is (sorry, Oracle changed the branding over time, so the appreciation day title has changed as well), you can read about it in Tim Hall’s post.

I’ve been participating in this appreciation day from the beginning. You can read my posts from 2016 (about RAC), 2017 (about plan statistics) and 2018 (about image based installation).

This year I wanted to write about gold image installations, because it’s really cool. But I already wrote a full post about it, and the appreciation day from 2018 was on the same general subject, so I decided to go for something else.

Standby database is definitely not new. It’s been around for more than 20 years now, but it keeps evolving all the time. It was introduce in Oracle 8i in 1998. 9i (2001) introduced Data Guard, the DG broker, and logical standby database. In 11g (2007) Oracle added Active Data Guard. And now in 19c we have standby DML redirection (and this is only a VERY partial list of features).

I have quite a few clients that are using standby database for years and I’m impressed by how robust this solution is. This is a perfect DR solution, easy to implement and manage and it simply works.

One example I can provide was from last year. It was a winter evening and I took my son (5.5 years old then) to ski on one of the mountains outside of Vancouver. We had a good time and I got a phone call as we had a rest. It was one of my clients saying that the production server is down and it’s unknown when they’ll be able to bring it up. They don’t have a DBA in their team and I’m basically their DBA so they needed my help. You can understand that I can’t do a lot from the mountain when my laptop is home (and I have a 5.5 years old kid with me, with not a lot of patience). It took me only a few minutes to guide them to connect to the standby database and issue “failover to XXX” command in dgmgrl, and Voilà, they have a running production database they can use.

So working with Oracle standby from Oracle 8.0 (where I wrote manual script to apply the redo logs) all the way to 18c (no 19c in production yet), all I can say is #ThanksOGB.

See you next year.

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