Objectives:	Introduce an alternative architecture with many benefits of RAC without the expense or complexity. Understand how operating a database farm differs from standalone servers and RAC. Consider criteria for deciding whether a database farm is appropriate.
Abstract:	Oracle offers several tools to protect against down time and to restore a database in the event of a hardware failure. Depending on the size of the database, tolerance for down time, and tolerance for data loss – not to mention the expertise level of their staff – companies can choose anything from a large RAC with offsite standbys to support full availability and no data loss to the most simple recovery strategy based on offline backups or exports. The RAC and/or Dataguard solutions maximize availability but can be expensive and complex to set up and run. Relying on RMAN or exports is simple and inexpensive, but if the databases are large it can take too long to restore files or perform imports. For those situations where the database is large and a small amount of down time is tolerable, there is another alternative using multiple servers with shared storage. We’ll describe the configuration and situations where this compromise solution is appropriate.
Audiernce Focus:	Architects
Expertise:	Beginner
Track:	Architecture
Date:	Thursday, April 17, 2008
Time:	9:45 AM - 10:45 AM