MAA and more

This chapter discusses those products that can be combined with a Real Application Cluster (RAC) environment to provide a more robust solution for data protection. These products include Data Guard, Oracle Streams, extended clusters, and other third-party tools. The main purpose of Oracle Data Guard is to provide data protection for the primary database environment by copying data from one location (primary) to another (secondary), thereby protecting it from natural disasters and human error. When the primary environment is not available, data can still be accessed from the secondary environment until the primary environment is accessible, at which time the application can be connected back to the primary environment. Because of its simplicity of implementation and fullness of protection against site disasters, database corruptions, and user errors, Data Guard combined with RAC makes up Oracle's Maximum Available Architecture (MAA) blueprint. In this chapter, high-availability solutions from Oracle are discussed. The basics of the Data Guard architecture, failover, fast application notification (FAN), and transparent application failover (TAF) are also elaborated in the chapter.