HENS

Kristien Hens is currently working as a Technology System Engineer, focusing on storage and cluster technologies. Before that she worked for four years for Sun Educational Services. She has taught storage and Sun Cluster courses to customers and Sun engineers. She has also developed and taught the courses “Oracle 9i for Sun Engineers” and “Oracle 9i RAC on Sun Cluster 3.x Workshop.” She is coauthor of three Sun BluePrints OnLine articles.   Michael Loebmann has been the local senior systems engineer for the ISV Oracle in Germany for three years. His tasks include both the exchange of technical knowledge between Oracle and Sun and customer consultation with regard to competition. He has been working in the computer field since 1990, and for Oracle since 1993. He has more than nine years of experience with Oracle products, especially in Oracle data warehousing and parallel Oracle databases (OPS and RAC). His specialties include Oracle performance tuning on Solaris and the investigation of database performance on storage subsystems.

Acknowledgments iii

Preface xiii

 

Chapter 1: Understanding High Availability for Databases 1

Assessing the Criticality of a Solution 2

Assessing High Availability Requirements for Databases 6

Choosing the Correct Configuration to Support HA Requirements 11

Protecting Data–Beyond Application Availability 15

Preparing for Disasters–Business Continuity Management 20

 

Chapter 2: Understanding the Benefits of Implementing Oracle RAC on Sun Cluster Software 23

Using Oracle on the Solaris Operating System 24

Understanding the Value of Oracle and Sun Mature Technologies 28

Understanding the Robustness of Sun Cluster Software 28

Understanding Options for Accessing Memory Remotely 33

Understanding Options for Storing Data 35

Supporting Enterprise Continuity Solutions 37

Looking at the Future of Oracle and Sun Cluster 42

 

Chapter 3: Understanding the Oracle RAC Architecture and Sun Cluster Software Internals 43

Designing a Hardware Architecture to Support High Availability 44

Using an Operating System That Supports High Availability 51

Examining Sun Cluster Software Internals 54

Understanding the Interaction of Sun Cluster Packages for OPS/RAC 70

Examining Oracle RAC Functionality 78

 

Chapter 4: Applying Preferred Practices to Oracle RAC and Sun Cluster Implementations 91

Installing Oracle RAC in a Sun Cluster 3.x Environment 91

Understanding Oracle Data Configuration 101

Configuring Data for Oracle RAC 109

Configuring Archive Log Locations 116

Understanding Client Connections 125

Managing Client Connections in Oracle 9i RAC 129

Tuning Sun Cluster 3.x Software for Oracle RAC 133

 

Chapter 5: Examining High Availability Real-World Implementations 141

Analyzing Real-World Customer Solutions 142

Providing High Availability Services in the Banking Sector 144

Supporting the Seasonal HA Requirements of the Resort Industry 153

Improving Performance With Oracle RAC and Sun’s Remote Shared Memory 159

Addressing HA With an HA Oracle Agent in a Consolidated Environment 161

 

Appendix A: History of Oracle’s Parallel Database Technology 165

Sun Cluster 2.x and Oracle OPS 166

Cluster Architectures and Oracle Parallel Server Technology 175

Oracle’s Cache Coherency Protocol 178

The Famous Ping 178

Always in Turn Please–Enqueues 180

Oracle 9i: Cache Fusion II–All Fusion? 182

 

Appendix B: Sample Service Level Agreement 183

Service Levels 185

 

Appendix C: Examples of the scsetup Utility 187

Setting Up the Oracle RAC Framework Resource Group 187

Registering a VxVM Diskgroup in the Cluster With the scsetup Utility 190

Registering VxVM Volumes With the scsetup Utility 192