Conversation with Drew Zhu Feb142008

Conversation with Drew Zhu  Feb 14 or 152008

We built a RAC test environment.  Created a long query.  Tried the failover by disengaging one node while the query was running.  This worked fine.

Didn't fail over on the application server as well.  End user was bounced out of their session and had to close their browser and then start again.  We didn't like this.

We're not pressed to make a move right now so we're still undecided.  We're angling toward the hot standby (Data Guard) more so.  We haven't tested this yet either to see how long it takes to switch over to the hot standby but we will.  When you switch to the hot standby, does the primary then become the hot standby?  How do the two environment get re-synchronized?  Not sure yet.

If we go to RAC, we'll also use the hot standby as well.

We haven't gone as far as you have in testing the RAC, so it's hard to say more.  You should probably use Enterprise Oracle, not Standard Edition.  For standard edition, have to have ASM on.  For Enterprise Edition, no ASM. 

We may want RAC for scalability.  Just adding more nodes is a good thing for us.

RAC needs more DBA work.  DBAs need deeper knowledge of Oracle.  Can't use the same knowledge base for regular Oracle.  I'm not ready for RAC.  I have to learn more.

Why don't you go stand alone for now, maybe hot spare, and let Patrick keep figuring out what to do about the RAC.