Dbvisit Standby vs. 'home grown' DBA scripts

[Mike Donovan]

Question:
Some DBA's use RMAN to develop scripts to backup, transfer, and restore data to standby databases. Compared to these kinds of home grown RMAN jobs/scripts, what advantages does Dbvisit Standby provide?

Answer:
Dbvisit Standby is a proven, reliable and stable solution, and is fully supported. The challenge with developing an in-house/custom solution is what to do when things go wrong.

• Has the DBA covered all the bases? (it is very difficult to test and simulate all the issues that can go wrong).
• Is it going to be reliable and stable in the long run?
• What happens when the DBA that developed the script leaves your organisation?
• Will a new DBA understand how the script works and be confident enough to use it (and fix it) when things go wrong?
• What will happen when you upgrade or patch Oracle? Will you be confident that it still works?
• What will happen if you migrate to another platform? Dbvisit Standby works on most platforms that are supported by Oracle including Windows, Linux and Unix.

In a disaster or failure you have to be very confident that the solution works. You also have to know how to reverse the process after a disaster or failure when the standby database has become the primary database. Dbvisit Standby meets these requirements, and has gained credibility from its many, diverse and international customer base.

Some of the benefits of Dbvisit Standby, as opposed to a 'home grown' solution, are:

• Dbvisit Standby supports RAC with RAC failover. This means that when one node is down, Dbvisit Standby on the other node takes over to transfer archive logs from both threads
• With Dbvisit Standby you can have multiple standby databases from one primary database each with their own update schedule
• Time delayed updating of standby database, mitigating data loss due to human error or software error
• Full reporting on transfer process, archive log gap and transfer log gap (differences between the primary and standby database)
• Full notification functionality built in
• Complete documentation available
• User forum community
• Complete and comprehensive error checking to ensure mechanism is robust. Trace files are produced which can be sent to the Dbvisit Standby support team for fast problem resolution
• Easy to setup and administer
• Continued product development to ensure Dbvisit Standby will be compatible with all the latest Oracle features and releases
• Robust, secure and encrypted transportation mechanism even on Windows.
• Automatic Standby Database creation.
• Support for ASM, OMF and Flash recovery area.

In summary the Dbvisit Standby advantage is:

1. Cost. You can save on license fees and maintenance fees using Dbvisit Standby in a primary and standby server environment, instead of upgrading to Enterprise Edition to utilise Data Guard.
2. Simplicity. Dbvisit Standby is very simple to install, configure and administer. It includes all the tools and utilities to effectively and easily manage the standby environment.
3. Fully featured. Dbvisit Standby matches Data Guard on features such as failover, graceful switchover, RAC, ASM and OMF. Out of the box Dbvisit Standby includes a number of advanced features such as compression, monitoring and encryption for archive log transportation.
4. Automatic Standby Database creation. Dbvisit Standby creates the standby database and standby database environment for you. Simple yet powerful.
5. Trusted and proven by organizations worldwide for their Oracle Disaster Recovery.