Ensuring High Availability for

Critical Systems and Applications

Using SharePlex

to Ensure Your Oracle Databases Are Always Up and Running

Written by Tom Chu, Product Manager, Dell Software
Abstract
Keeping business systems and applications up and running
requires high availability of the Oracle databases they depend
upon. This technical brief explains how SharePlex

can help
organizations ensure high availability of their Oracle databases
to improve overall system availability.
Introduction
What is high availability?
High availability means diferent things to diferent organizations.
Some companies measure the response time in a given
application. If it is within a certain threshold, the system is
considered available. Other organizations continually sample
transaction or network throughputs to determine whether the
system is considered available.
Whatever the measure, the ultimate goal of a highly available
environment is to maximize the time it is accessible and
operational. This is critical in todays global 24x7 business
environment where any IT system downtime incurs a large cost.
Application high availability requires Oracle high availability
Because an Oracle database is often an integral part of a
business application, any availability problems with the
database immediately impact the business application using the
database. Therefore, for an application to be highly available, the
underlying Oracle databases must also be highly available.
The availability of an Oracle database is afected primarily by
three factors:
Planned system outages
Unplanned system outages
High system load
Fortunately, you can reduce planned and unplanned system
outages and control high system load. This paper explains
how SharePlex can ensure Oracle high availability to help
your organization meet its goal of system and application
high availability.
2
SharePlex
immediately
replicates any
change in data on
the source to the
target, so the target
database is always in
sync, with no lag in
data availability.
Reducing planned Oracle outages
An Oracle database requires numerous
periodic maintenance tasks that either
require a complete database outage or
provide very limited system availability.
These tasks are typically performed on a
scheduled maintenance run, which may
be daily, weekly, monthly, or once every
few years, depending on the nature of
the task.
These periodic maintenance tasks include:
Data warehousing using resource-intensive
extract transform load (ETL) software
Periodic reports
System backups
Storage tune-ups, such as adding or
removing indexes, reorganizations, or
collecting statistics
Hardware changes
Software changes, such as OS patches and
database upgrades
Migrations (moving an Oracle database
from one operating system platform to
another)
Traditionally, IT administrators scheduled
these tasks during maintenance time
windows outside of normal business
hours. However, with the rapid
globalization of business operations
and internet access, the maintenance
windows are getting smaller and smaller.
SharePlex for Oracle databases
Fortunately, SharePlex can help eliminate
planned Oracle outages altogether.
The leading database replication solution,
SharePlex supports high availability,
disaster recovery, reporting, data
movement, and application integration,
all with zero to minimal impact on
Oracle systems. SharePlex provides
data compare and repair, in-ight data
integrity, plus monitoring and alerting
functionalities.
SharePlex ensures continuous,
uninterrupted business ow while
meeting your database operational
goals by providing a real-time copy
of production data without degrading
your OLTP systems performance and
availability. The data is replicated from
one database server to another database
server, and replication runs continuously,
with no scheduling required. SharePlex
immediately replicates any change in
data on the source to the target, so the
target database is always in sync, with
no lag in data availability. SharePlex
employs a streaming process outside of
the database instance. It creates a small
footprint for minimal impact on database
performance and network capacity.
Operational reporting/
Archiving/Data warehousing
Data distribution/
Distributed processing
Centralized reporting
(Consolidation)
Data integration
Structured /
Unstructured
Oracle
Cascading using
intermediary systems
High availability/
Disaster recovery
8i/9i/10g 10g/11g
Migrations, patches & upgrades
Load balancing
Change tracking
Figure 1. Use SharePlex to ensure business continuity while meeting your database
operational goals.
3
SharePlex can
help you eliminate
planned outages for
data warehousing
using ETL software
and for periodic
reporting.
Eliminating planned outages for ETL and
reporting
SharePlex can help you eliminate
planned outages for data warehousing
using ETL software and for periodic
reporting. Begin by adding a secondary
Oracle database to your network. This
database can be bigger or smaller than
the primary Oracle database; it can even
be on diferent hardware or a diferent
operating system platform, or run a
diferent Oracle version (like Oracle
Standard Edition) to save you licensing
and maintenance costs.
SharePlex efciently replicates data
needed for ETL and reporting processes
from your large, mission-critical systems
and stages it into to the new secondary
Oracle system in real time. ETL
processes or reports can be run from the
secondary system at any time without
impacting performance, eliminating the
need for planned outages of the primary
Oracle database.
If there is a structural diference
between primary and secondary
systems, you should use SharePlexs
real-time transformation capabilities to
change the SQL before it is applied to
the secondary system.
Eliminating planned outages for system
backups and storage tune-ups
To eliminate planned outages for system
backups and storage tune-ups, add an
identical secondary Oracle database to
your environment.
SharePlex efciently replicates the
primary Oracle database to the
secondary system in real time, without
impacting database performance or
requiring large bandwidth. System
backups can then be performed from
the up-to-date secondary system,
eliminating the need for downtime on
your primary system.
Storage-related tasks, such as index
creation, statistics gathering, and
reorganizations, can also be performed
on the secondary system. Once these
tasks have been performed on the
secondary system, use SharePlex to
automatically and seamlessly switch
the roles of the primary and secondary
systems in seconds.
Eliminating planned outages for
hardware and software changes
and migrations
To eliminate planned outages for
hardware and software changes and for
migrations, create a secondary server
that has all the software and hardware
changes in place. Then have SharePlex
perform a bidirectional replication
between the primary and secondary
systems. SharePlex is exible enough to
go between most Oracle versions and
platforms (this may include introducing
new database features such as RAC, ASM,
etc.), so you dont need to worry about
whether the source and target versions
and platforms match, as long as the
replication target can hold all the object
types that you are replicating.
Source
Export
queue
Capture
queue
Post
queue
SQL
Target Cloud target
Export Import
Capture
Read
Post
Post
Redo/archive logs
Figure 2. The SharePlex data replication process
4
Once the primary and secondary systems
are in sync and the appropriate outage
window is available, simply point your
applications and users, in stages, over to
the new system, and it will go live.
Regardless of the amount of testing
performed, changes to the live system are
never without issues, some minor, some
more severe. Should a problem occur
with the new system after going live, you
can always switch back to the old system,
since it has been updated by SharePlex.
This strategy has a much lower risk and
involves less downtime than performing
upgrades directly to the primary server.
Reducing unplanned Oracle outages
Unplanned outages are caused by various
forms of system failure, from simple
software or hardware failures to disasters
that destroy complete infrastructure, such
as res, oods, hurricanes, tornados, or
terrorism. Business continuity planning for
such events is critical to risk mitigation and
ultimately to the survival of the business.
Disaster recovery strategies and tools
Oracle servers can be made resilient to
simple unplanned server outages using
built-in Oracle technology such as Real
Application Cluster (RAC). However,
RAC provides continuity only in cases
in which the server that is processing
the data fails; it does not protect against
permanent storage failures. Moreover,
it works only in a very small geographic
range, limiting its usefulness for large-
scale disaster recovery.
Many third-party disaster recovery
solutions are inclusive of hardware and
software. For instance, some disc vendors
provide mirroring through a LAN, but
that strategy, of course, has limitations
related to both distance and bandwidth.
Oracle provides a solution called
Physical DataGuard, but it has limitations,
including problems with bandwidth.
Using SharePlex for disaster recovery
SharePlex provides a exible, low-impact
solution for disaster recovery. SharePlex
replication is asynchronous and only
replicates application changes to the
database; therefore, SharePlex has a
much smaller bandwidth requirement
than other solutions. Physical distance is
also not a limitation for SharePlex; many
customers are using replication through
their WANs across continents.
Using SharePlex to address high system
loads
The amount of data captured and
accessed by organizations to drive
business decisions is increasing
dramatically. Businesses need the most
current information from their servers
for operational decision-making, billing,
inventory control, and so on. This up-
to-the-minute information is vital to the
business, but access to this transactional
data comes at a cost.
Real-time reporting and real-time data
requirements add overhead to already
overloaded transactional systems. To
support the need for access to up-to-
the-minute data, organizations need a
solution to lessen the strain on database
systems while ensuring valuable data is
always available. SharePlex is the only
low-impact, real-time reporting solution
that creates a secondary instance of the
transactional data to ofoad reporting;
SharePlex reduces the strain on your
production system immensely.
Conclusion
With SharePlex, you can reduce or
eliminate planned and unplanned
downtime. No matter what your
business needs are, you can ensure
Oracle database availability, regardless
of edition, and achieve system and
application high availability with ease.
About the author
Tom Chu has more than 15 years of
experience working with data replication
solutions. He joined Quest Software (now
a part of Dell) in 1994 and has worked
with SharePlex since its inception in
1998. Tom has served in multiple roles
for theSharePlex team, including product
management, business development and
technical consulting.
SharePlex has
a much smaller
bandwidth
requirement than
other solutions.
5
TechBrief-EnsuringHighAvailabilityForCritical-US-SW-2013-07-10
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