Re: Standby Instance questions and HA
To be truly contrary to anyone else :) here are some thoughts we've been trying to think recently here at Miracle regarding clusters and OPS/RAC from Oracle: There can be three main reasons for using clusters (I think): - High availability. But how often does a Unix or Windows2000 server crash these days? Now, if you have servers that crash before you cluster them, you're exactly going to help things by clustering several servers that are crash prone, are you? I mean: 0.9 x 0.9 is not 2.1 :-)). So: If you have servers that crash now and then, you should probably get that fixed first - otherwise you'll be very disappointed by clustering them. It's not exactly something that is widely published by IBM or other vendors, but when you move from a standalone AIX server to a two-node HA/CMP cluster you also move from 99.9% availability to 98% availability. This is known by the good techies everywhere inside vendor organisations. There are several reasons for this, which I'll get back to in a second... - Cpu scaling. When Digial made their original VAX clusters it was partly because you could only put one cpu in each box. That argument doesn't really count in the Unix world these days, but it might have come back with the relatively few cpus supported on Windows this and Windows that. - Application partitioning: Let the OLTP users run against box A and the batch users against box B. Now, when people want to run clusters (for whatever reason) and run into problems, it's usually due to: - The added complexity. You add three layers (more or less) to the technology stack. Does that make anything more stable ;-) ? Just think about shared disks, which works fantastic, by the way, in VMS, but not really anywhere else (yeah, I use every chance to make fun of Unix, although I know VMS is dead). - The additional management burden. As you guys have found out, it's pretty hard to understand, setup, administer, manage and - especially - troubleshoot. - The added people skills required. You don't just run clusters and/or OPS/RAC as an average DBA. That's why we at Miracle really hope the sales of these technologies will take off, since we have some of the few guys here in Denmark who know about it :-))). Here's something else I've been wondering about: If the rather smart folks at the various Unix vendors (they're hardly any stupider than us on this list, do you think?) cannot get this stuff to work after having tried for many years - why do people then beleive that Microsoft can get it to work just like that? That's the beauty of people: They keep beleiving in the next technical fix. Most OPS-sites I have known about thoughout the ages have gone to standby solutions (called DataGuard in Oracle9i, I think) and dropped the OPS/cluster stuff. Mogens Gene Sais wrote: I also heard of horror stories regarding Sun Clusters. I worked w/ HP MC Service guard, good product. Now working w/ IBM HACMP, also good product, although more complicated to set up (but then again I am not a IBM'er). IBM tends to do everything their way ;). In the future when I upgrade to 9i, I will use Oracle's Data Guard or maybe look at a 3rd party product such as shareplex (good reviews, but pricey).Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/02 01:05PM Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring meof Sun Clusters.At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby databaseremotely for disaster.Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I thinksome one on this list gave it a good review in the past .Thanks,Jim-Original Message-Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-LIBM HACMP works well.Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-)Seriously, we *did* get the Sun "clustering" working, but itrequired some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations.-Original Message-Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AMTo: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-LThanks for the advice everyone.So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover oth er thanOPS?Quest Shareplex?Standby database?Any others?Thanks,Jim-Original Message-Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-LI concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun "cluster" at deleted andit broke ALOT.Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more)in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to useit in "my business".Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change.Mit Gluck, mein freund...- Ross "mit schuss" Mohan-Original Message-Jim:Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not anOracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure severalmodules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMSfor Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO)is a bastardization of t he term. It truly is
Re: Standby Instance questions and HA
On Sunday 20 January 2002 06:45, Mogens Nørgaard wrote: Here's something else I've been wondering about: If the rather smart folks at the various Unix vendors (they're hardly any stupider than us on this list, do you think?) cannot get this stuff to work after having tried for many years - why do people then beleive that Microsoft can get it to work just like that? That's the beauty of people: They keep beleiving in the next technical fix. Mogens, Interesting you should mention that. I was the Sysadmin for a DG/UX system several years ago that we had implemted a failover system on. There have been several comments on the list this week about troubles with failover sytems not taking disk ownership when they should, taking it when they shouldn't, and it just generally not being too reliable. These are the exact same issues I had with failover in 1995/96, and apparently none of the vendors have figured it out yet. The only semi-reliable method to accomplish a failover was to do it manually, and even them sometimes I had to get into the nitty gritty of the CLI tools behind the interface. Maybe they need some rocket scientists? :) Jared -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Jared Still INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
I would not say any vendor. I have yet to have an issue with HP and failover. Its worked every time and is relatively easy to setup and use. I have no experience with any other vendor in that area though. -Original Message- Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 1:35 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L On Sunday 20 January 2002 06:45, Mogens Nørgaard wrote: Here's something else I've been wondering about: If the rather smart folks at the various Unix vendors (they're hardly any stupider than us on this list, do you think?) cannot get this stuff to work after having tried for many years - why do people then beleive that Microsoft can get it to work just like that? That's the beauty of people: They keep beleiving in the next technical fix. Mogens, Interesting you should mention that. I was the Sysadmin for a DG/UX system several years ago that we had implemted a failover system on. There have been several comments on the list this week about troubles with failover sytems not taking disk ownership when they should, taking it when they shouldn't, and it just generally not being too reliable. These are the exact same issues I had with failover in 1995/96, and apparently none of the vendors have figured it out yet. The only semi-reliable method to accomplish a failover was to do it manually, and even them sometimes I had to get into the nitty gritty of the CLI tools behind the interface. Maybe they need some rocket scientists? :) Jared -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Jared Still INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Kimberly Smith INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
AFAIK, TAF does not support Forms. Refer to Note 114548.1 and 97926.1 (quoting from 114548.1 : Developer applications do not support TAF as there is no great advantage in using it. and from 97926.1: At the time of writing only a limited number of client environments are 'failover aware'. These include: Sql*Plus 8.1 OCI8 and clients built using OCI8 Hemant K Chitale Principal DBA Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd Jamadagni, Rajendra [EMAIL PROTECTED] 18/01/2002 11:50 PM Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please respond to ORACLE-L To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: (bcc: CHITALE Hemant Krishnarao/Prin DBA/CSM/ST Group) Subject: RE: Standby Instance questions and HA Speaking of TAF, Does anyone know (or have tested/implemented/explored) TAF with Forms application? Does this work?? We have another JAVA application that connects using JDBC and looks for certain errors and whenever it detects an error (appropriate one), it reconnects to the other side. Both sides are 9i instances. __ Rajendra Jamadagni MIS, ESPN Inc. Rajendra dot Jamadagni at ESPN dot com Any opinion expressed here is personal and doesn't reflect that of ESPN Inc. QOTD: Any clod can have facts, but having an opinion is an art! -Original Message- Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 8:31 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Ah but with 9i, RAC and TAF you can have the users reconnected automagically and they will resume their transactions inflight. Attachment Removed : ESPN_Disclaimer.txt -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Hi, thanks for you advice. Let me see if I've got it straight... So what you are using is purely OS based. No special Oracle software. There is only one node available at a time, and if it fails, then the second one starts up, in roughly the same state as the first (i.e. no uncommitted transactions lost)? But the power of the second node cannot be utilised in conjunction with the first. Is this correct? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Smith Sent: 18 January 2002 01:46 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Hi, thanks for your advice. Data Guard is available for 8i as well I think. I will have to look into what exactly it does, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 18:51 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I also heard of horror stories regarding Sun Clusters. I worked w/ HP MC Service guard, good product. Now working w/ IBM HACMP, also good product, although more complicated to set up (but then again I am not a IBM'er). IBM tends to do everything their way ;). In the future when I upgrade to 9i, I will use Oracle's Data Guard or maybe look at a 3rd party product such as shareplex (good reviews, but pricey). Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/02 01:05PM Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list,
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
When I failover, I bring the Oracle Home as well. Do you have special reasons for not bringing the Oracle Home over? *just curious* Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/02 08:45PM You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Ah but with 9i, RAC and TAF you can have the users reconnected automagically and they will resume their transactions inflight. --- Kimberly Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject:Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
I have way to many f'ing Oracle Homes to deal with. When I first got here they were all different versions as well. So it was more of a maintenance thing. To tell you the truth someone else originally set it up that way and I liked it so I kept it. It does mean I have to keep more in sync manually then I normally would have to. If I only had one database on the server (or if they were all developed in-house) I probably would have installed the software on failover disks as well. Do you fail over the Unix account as well? -Original Message- Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 4:50 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L When I failover, I bring the Oracle Home as well. Do you have special reasons for not bringing the Oracle Home over? *just curious* Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/02 08:45PM You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
True but I doubt they will approve the downtime for the upgrade now:-) -Original Message- Carmichael Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 5:31 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Ah but with 9i, RAC and TAF you can have the users reconnected automagically and they will resume their transactions inflight. --- Kimberly Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject:Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Speaking of TAF, Does anyone know (or have tested/implemented/explored) TAF with Forms application? Does this work?? We have another JAVA application that connects using JDBC and looks for certain errors and whenever it detects an error (appropriate one), it reconnects to the other side. Both sides are 9i instances. __ Rajendra Jamadagni MIS, ESPN Inc. Rajendra dot Jamadagni at ESPN dot com Any opinion expressed here is personal and doesn't reflect that of ESPN Inc. QOTD: Any clod can have facts, but having an opinion is an art! -Original Message- Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 8:31 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Ah but with 9i, RAC and TAF you can have the users reconnected automagically and they will resume their transactions inflight. *2 This e-mail message is confidential, intended only for the named recipient(s) above and may contain information that is privileged, attorney work product or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you have received this message in error, or are not the named recipient(s), please immediately notify corporate MIS at (860) 766-2000 and delete this e-mail message from your computer, Thank you. *2
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Nah, I make sure all servers have the same uid/gid for oracle but I have naming standards for the lv's and filesystems. This allows me to failover multiple primary servers to a single secondary. I was just curious, b/c I have seen other sites that use your method. I prefer not having to synch multiple OH's. I can just see it happen 6 mos from now, failover occurs, but someone forgot the synch, o o :). Thanks. Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/18/02 09:50AM I have way to many f'ing Oracle Homes to deal with. When I first got here they were all different versions as well. So it was more of a maintenance thing. To tell you the truth someone else originally set it up that way and I liked it so I kept it. It does mean I have to keep more in sync manually then I normally would have to. If I only had one database on the server (or if they were all developed in-house) I probably would have installed the software on failover disks as well. Do you fail over the Unix account as well? -Original Message- Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 4:50 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L When I failover, I bring the Oracle Home as well. Do you have special reasons for not bringing the Oracle Home over? *just curious* Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/02 08:45PM You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
I've seen a similar idea running on Silicon Graphics kit : 2 servers; heartbeat check between them; Drives mount on the other box when the 'live' system fails It was nice when it worked...Testing the failover caused barely a ripple, although it did disconnect any open sessions. Alas, it rarely worked that well when there was an actual problem. As with the Sun solution, no extra charge from Oracle, but added costs from SG. Still, who in their right mind would choose to run a production database on discontinued SGI machines? Simon Anderson Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc:(bcc: Simon Anderson/SSplc) We have this in place on Sun as well. It is similar to a cluster in that it has a separate box (Ultra 2) monitoring a heartbeat between both database servers. You will have a significant impact during failover. All drives common to both boxes will be unmounted on the primary and remounted on the secondary (which then becomes the primary). Since a fsck is run for each file system it can take upwards of 30 minutes for the failover. The database is shut down and brought back up so all connections are severed which means an interruption of service. If I wanted H/A on Sun I would move to 9i and implement a RAC. No application changes are necessary with this new version of OPS. Good luck. --Michael -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:03 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
It does reduce your maintenance windows though when you are upgrading. Really nice when you are a 24x7 shop. I do not have to have a database down when upgrading the software. I will actually run catalog and catproc with the database open for business and have not had an issue yet. So I do one side of the node, fail the databases over, run the upgrade script, and do the other side after that has successfully been completed. On my N-classes it really does not take long. -Original Message- Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 9:21 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Nah, I make sure all servers have the same uid/gid for oracle but I have naming standards for the lv's and filesystems. This allows me to failover multiple primary servers to a single secondary. I was just curious, b/c I have seen other sites that use your method. I prefer not having to synch multiple OH's. I can just see it happen 6 mos from now, failover occurs, but someone forgot the synch, o o :). Thanks. Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/18/02 09:50AM I have way to many f'ing Oracle Homes to deal with. When I first got here they were all different versions as well. So it was more of a maintenance thing. To tell you the truth someone else originally set it up that way and I liked it so I kept it. It does mean I have to keep more in sync manually then I normally would have to. If I only had one database on the server (or if they were all developed in-house) I probably would have installed the software on failover disks as well. Do you fail over the Unix account as well? -Original Message- Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 4:50 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L When I failover, I bring the Oracle Home as well. Do you have special reasons for not bringing the Oracle Home over? *just curious* Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/02 08:45PM You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd
Re: Standby Instance questions and HA
What you are describing sounds like Oracle FailSafe. It is free from Oracle, does not require Oracle Enterprise version (Standard/workgroup can be used), only runs on NT, and requires MicroSoft Cluster Services (MSCS) which is included in NT4.0 EE or W2K Advanced Server. As for Sun Solaris, I know nothing so will be of no help to you there. James McCann james@openet-teTo: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] lecom.com cc: Sent by:Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/2002 06:40 AM Please respond to ORACLE-L Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Allen R. Lucas INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
I think your right. But does anyone know what is use on Solaris? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 15:00 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] What you are describing sounds like Oracle FailSafe. It is free from Oracle, does not require Oracle Enterprise version (Standard/workgroup can be used), only runs on NT, and requires MicroSoft Cluster Services (MSCS) which is included in NT4.0 EE or W2K Advanced Server. As for Sun Solaris, I know nothing so will be of no help to you there. James McCann james@openet-teTo: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] lecom.com cc: Sent by:Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/2002 06:40 AM Please respond to ORACLE-L Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Check the Sun web site. Sun has clustering. I do not know the name of the product off the top of my head since I use HP MC/ServiceGuard. -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 7:06 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I think your right. But does anyone know what is use on Solaris? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 15:00 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] What you are describing sounds like Oracle FailSafe. It is free from Oracle, does not require Oracle Enterprise version (Standard/workgroup can be used), only runs on NT, and requires MicroSoft Cluster Services (MSCS) which is included in NT4.0 EE or W2K Advanced Server. As for Sun Solaris, I know nothing so will be of no help to you there. James McCann james@openet-teTo: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] lecom.com cc: Sent by:Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/2002 06:40 AM Please respond to ORACLE-L Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Kimberly Smith INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Full Moon. (it's going through stages, waxing. give me a break.) Supposedly they named it that because wolves howl at the moon. Get it? Wolfpack is microsoft's clustering moniker. Give me another break. Doesn't Scott McNealy have a jacuzzi at home he can spend time in?) -Original Message- Check the Sun web site. Sun has clustering. I do not know the name of the product off the top of my head since I use HP MC/ServiceGuard. -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 7:06 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I think your right. But does anyone know what is use on Solaris? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 15:00 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] What you are describing sounds like Oracle FailSafe. It is free from Oracle, does not require Oracle Enterprise version (Standard/workgroup can be used), only runs on NT, and requires MicroSoft Cluster Services (MSCS) which is included in NT4.0 EE or W2K Advanced Server. As for Sun Solaris, I know nothing so will be of no help to you there. James McCann james@openet-teTo: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] lecom.com cc: Sent by:Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/2002 06:40 AM Please respond to ORACLE-L Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Kimberly Smith INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Mohan, Ross INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Veritas also has a product that will do this for you... -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:46 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Check the Sun web site. Sun has clustering. I do not know the name of the product off the top of my head since I use HP MC/ServiceGuard. -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 7:06 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I think your right. But does anyone know what is use on Solaris? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 15:00 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] What you are describing sounds like Oracle FailSafe. It is free from Oracle, does not require Oracle Enterprise version (Standard/workgroup can be used), only runs on NT, and requires MicroSoft Cluster Services (MSCS) which is included in NT4.0 EE or W2K Advanced Server. As for Sun Solaris, I know nothing so will be of no help to you there. James McCann james@openet-teTo: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] lecom.com cc: Sent by:Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/2002 06:40 AM Please respond to ORACLE-L Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Kimberly Smith INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Johnston, Tim INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Baker, Barbara INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Mohan, Ross INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
We have this in place on Sun as well. It is similar to a cluster in that it has a separate box (Ultra 2) monitoring a heartbeat between both database servers. You will have a significant impact during failover. All drives common to both boxes will be unmounted on the primary and remounted on the secondary (which then becomes the primary). Since a fsck is run for each file system it can take upwards of 30 minutes for the failover. The database is shut down and brought back up so all connections are severed which means an interruption of service. If I wanted H/A on Sun I would move to 9i and implement a RAC. No application changes are necessary with this new version of OPS. Good luck. --Michael -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:03 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Baker, Barbara INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Jenkins, Michael INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
Re: Standby Instance questions and HA
It's not an Oracle thing, so there wouldn't be anything in the docs yes, you need a clustered environment, or at the least the ability for the disks to be mounted on the second server when the first one goes down. As long as the disk that oracle has been installed on is one of the ones that moves, or the install is identical, you can do this. --- James McCann [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). __ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/ -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Rachel Carmichael INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Baker, Barbara INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Mohan, Ross INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing:
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
we had it with FirstWatch from Veritas on top -- sometimes disks didn't get dismounted from the first server, or remounted on the second one.. then we had database failures --- Baker, Barbara [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject:Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Baker, Barbara INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). __ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/ -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Rachel Carmichael INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Baker, Barbara INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Mohan, Ross INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
I also heard of horror stories regarding Sun Clusters. I worked w/ HP MC Service guard, good product. Now working w/ IBM HACMP, also good product, although more complicated to set up (but then again I am not a IBM'er). IBM tends to do everything their way ;). In the future when I upgrade to 9i, I will use Oracle's Data Guard or maybe look at a 3rd party product such as shareplex (good reviews, but pricey). Gene [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/17/02 01:05PM Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
I recommend HP. But that does not run on Sun to well:-) -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 9:12 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: James McCann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Baker, Barbara INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California-- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see
RE: Standby Instance questions and HA
You will always have the same issues with fail over technology. Your users will get disconnected. My databases take less then 5 minutes to fail over and that is an acceptable time frame to the client. Its great from my standpoint for maintenance cause I can do it on one node, fail the databases over, and bring the other node up to date. I do not have the Oracle software itself in fail over, just the database. We do not find it to hard to work with here. I have no experience with Sun's so I cannot compare them. Whether or not you go with fail over technology all depends on what you are looking for.You will not lose any committed data with HP's (probably not with anyone else's either). Fail over is automatic when configured correctly. I have seen it happen once that I did not even know, it was that quick. Went to go look for my database on the server and it was not there:-) -Original Message- McCann Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 10:05 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for your help everyone. Very useful advice, although your scaring me of Sun Clusters. At the minute, Parallel server looks the best, with a standby database remotely for disaster. Does anyone know what the HP solution is like (MC Service Guard)? I think some one on this list gave it a good review in the past . Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 17:12 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L IBM HACMP works well. Ooops. guess that means you'll have to change some things. ;-) Seriously, we *did* get the Sun clustering working, but it required some serious feet-to-fire holding and gyrations. -Original Message- Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:54 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Thanks for the advice everyone. So what do you recommend on a Sun cluster/machines for failover other than OPS? Quest Shareplex? Standby database? Any others? Thanks, Jim -Original Message- Sent: 17 January 2002 16:22 To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I concur with BB.yea, I ran Sun cluster at deleted and it broke ALOT. Kept me and two full time Sun Engineers (they got paid ALOT more) in consulting dollars, but i made a mental note not to use it in my business. Caveat: this was 1.5 years ago. Things change. Mit Gluck, mein freund... - Ross mit schuss Mohan -Original Message- Jim: Sorry, you're not gonna like this answer. HA is a Sun product, not an Oracle product. Under Sun's High Availability, you can configure several modules like Sybase and Oracle. (The Oracle product is Sun Cluster HA-DBMS for Oracle.) It does require what I believe Sun calls a cluster but (IMHO) is a bastardization of the term. It truly is failover, not cluster. We've had lots of problems with it. It's caused us lots of grief, and only in a few instances gained us anything. It is NOT OPS, as the database does not run in parallel, but only on 1 box at a time. (Everything is double cabled, and so the drives are re-mounted on the 2nd box if a failover occurs.) Your users still get disconnected. You'd probably lose less data than with a standby (since you pick up with the same drives mounted on the other box), but it depends on how you have the standby implemented. There's no additional cost from Oracle to run this crap, but you'll be paying Sun great sums of money. The Sun web site has more info on HA. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck! Barb -- From: James McCann[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Reply To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 5:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Standby Instance questions and HA Hi, I was reading in the book Oracle 24/7 Tips and Techniques about Standby Instances. Note, this is not a standby database. From the book it seams to work in the following way... There is only one database. The database files exist on a shared disk pack. One machine is the primary instance, and if this instance dies, a new instance is started on the second machine using the datafiles on the shared disk. The problem is that I can't find anything in the Oracle docs about this, or on Meta Link. I also want to know if this method of HA requires a clustered environment (I think it does, but just want to be sure)? Also, does it come with an Enterprise Edition license? Or is it something which each hardware vendor implements in their own way, at extra cost? We have a requirement for a fail over method on Sun Solaris. We do not want to loose any committed data (i.e. a standby database could loose some), and want the fail over to be as automatic as possible. We don't want the expense of Parallel Server (Anyone know how expensive it is these days?). The disk pack is RAID, and we may also have a standby database off site. Has anyone any recommendations? Thanks, Jim -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ:
