The Foundation for Database-as-a-Service (White Paper)

High Availability Best Practices for Database Consolidation

The Foundation for Database-as-a-Service

Oracle White Paper

Executive Overview

Enterprises are under intense pressure to do more with less, to reduce risk and increase agility. The aggressive consolidation of information technology (IT) infrastructure and deployment of Database as a Service (DBaaS) on public or private clouds is a strategy that many enterprises are pursuing to accomplish these objectives.

Several key elements are needed to realize the full potential for cost reduction through database consolidation and DBaaS. High consolidation density and management simplicity are required to achieve maximum reduction in hardware and administrative costs. These attributes must then be combined with intelligent software infrastructure capable of achieving service level agreements (SLAs) for availability, performance, and data protection.

Oracle Multitenant with Oracle Database 12c represents a fundamental re-architecting of the Oracle Database to make it the best platform for database consolidation. Oracle Multitenant is evolutionary, making it simple to consolidate existing Oracle databases to reduce cost. Oracle Multitenant is also revolutionary, enabling maximum consolidation density and dramatically simplifying the management of consolidated database environments compared to previous consolidation strategies.

Oracle Multitenant with Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) provides high availability and data protection for consolidated database environments where the impact of any outage would otherwise be magnified many times over. While Oracle Multitenant and MAA provide unique benefit regardless of the underlying hardware platform or operating system environment, they provide maximum benefit when deployed on Oracle Engineered Systems. Oracle integrated hardware and software solutions reduce total life cycle costs by using standard, high performance platforms that achieve economies of scale for consolidated environments along multiple dimensions: performance, reliability, manageability, and support. Oracle Exadata Database Machine, for example, has demonstrated up to 5x advantage in consolidation density compared to traditional systems.

This paper provides MAA best practices for Database Consolidation using Oracle Multitenant. It describes standard HA architectures that are the foundation for DBaaS. It is most appropriate for a technical audience: Architects, Directors of IT and Database Administrators responsible for the consolidation and migration of traditional database deployments to DBaaS. Recommended best practices are equally relevant to any platform supported by Oracle Database except where explicitly noted as being an optimization or an example that applies only to Oracle Engineered systems.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/availability/maa-consolidation-2186395.pdf

Oracle Database High Availability On-Premises and in the Cloud (MMA White Paper)

Oracle MAA Reference Architectures

Oracle Database High Availability On-Premises and in the Cloud

Oracle White Paper

Introduction

Enterprises are under intense pressure to do more with less, reduce risk and increase agility. The aggressive consolidation of information technology (IT) infrastructure and deployment of Database as a Service (DBaaS) on public and private clouds is a strategy that many enterprises are pursuing to accomplish these objectives.

Database consolidation drives cost savings by dramatically improving system utilization and reducing management overhead. DBaaS drives cost savings and increased agility through the standardization of I.T. infrastructure and processes. The Cloud enhances these benefits by enabling a more efficient utility model of computing.

All of the above initiatives, however, also incur business risk by amplifying the impact of downtime and data loss. The failure of a standalone environment used by a single developer or small work group is usually of limited impact. The failure of a critical application running in a traditional standalone environment will be immediately felt by the business, but other applications can continue to run unaffected. In contrast, an outage of a consolidated environment supporting an organization’s entire development staff or multiple applications used by numerous departments would have a crippling effect on the business. Equally crippling would be an interruption in service at a cloud provider where such applications are running.

The Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (Oracle MAA) prescribes four HA reference architectures that provide the requisite level of standardization for DBaaS while addressing the complete range of availability and data protection required by enterprises of all sizes and lines of business. All reference architectures are based upon a common platform able to be deployed onpremises or on cloud. This approach makes Oracle MAA simpler and less risky to move to the cloud.

This paper describes Oracle MAA reference architectures in detail and the service level requirements that they address. It is most appropriate for a technical audience: Architects, Directors of IT and Database Administrators responsible for designing and implementing DBaaS and moving to the cloud.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/availability/maa-reference-architectures-2244929.pdf

Preventing, Detecting, and Repairing Block Corruption: Oracle Database 12c (White Paper)

Preventing, Detecting, and Repairing Block Corruption: Oracle Database 12c

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture

Oracle White Paper 

Executive Overview

In today’s information-driven enterprises, business critical information must be highly available, from internal company-sensitive data to applications that manage crucial partner and customer relationships. Outages are costly in lost revenue and damaged reputation, and can be crippling to the business.

Block corruptions are a common source of database outages. A database block is corrupted when its content has changed from what Oracle Database expects to find. If not prevented or repaired, block corruption can bring down the database and possibly result in the loss of key business data.

This Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) white paper presents the essential tools, techniques, and best practices to help you safeguard data and prevent corruptionrelated database outages. MAA is Oracle’s comprehensive best practices blueprint for implementing Oracle high availability technologies. The MAA best practices are described in a series of technical white papers and documentation to assist in designing, implementing, and managing optimal high availability architectures. The series of MAA white papers are available at the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture website.

This paper is applicable to Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/availability/corruption-bestpractices-12c-2141348.pdf