For this blog entry, I will be reviewing a book.
Oracle Database 10g High Availability with RAC, Flashback & Data Guard by Matthew Hart and Scott Jesse
The book is organized well with part 1 being logical availability, part 2 RAC, part 3 disaster planning and part 4 being the distributed database. The book starts out talking about high availability as an unreachable concept that typically requires a large budget. The author compares the computing grid to the utility grid. I sure hope that the grid that they are speaking of isn’t the power grid because it is down on a regular basis at my house. I have been looking at a UPS because ours is down for at least five minutes a month, every month. More during rainstorms.
I usually don’t mind a book that dives straight into the details but putting code on page 4 seems a bit much for me. The code isn’t explained very well but it is used as an example for the chapter. The code looks very simple, create tablespace, create a user, connect, create table and populate. The sample that they give stating that there is no window for a backup except on the weekends is a little hard to believe. The example on accounts receivable comsuming resources is a totally believable problem. The rest of the chapter just details more and more potential failures. Unfortunately, this chapter is not comprehensive and does not recommend solutions or processes to stop the problems. They also don’t detail the impact of the problems but implies that there are significant problems if the failure mode happens.
more later…..