Unplanned down time is primarily the result of computer failures or data failures.
Understand and develop Service Level Agreement (SLA)
First, DBA needs to understand Service Level Agreements (SLA) or customer’s service requirements.A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a negotiated agreement between two or more parties, where one is the customer and the others are service providers. SLA usually is part of a service contract where a service is formally defined. As an example, IT service providers will commonly include Service Level Agreements within the terms of their contracts with customers to define the level(s) of service being sold in plain language terms. A database SLA typically has a technical definition in terms of following.
System Availability
This is a main SLA element and commonly expressed as a percentage, but is often more meaningful when expressed as hours. For example, 99.9% availability is roughly equivalent to 8 hours and 45 minutes of maintenance window, or allowed downtime, per year.| Availability Target | Downtime Per Year (approx.) |
| 90 % | 36 days |
| 98 % | 7.3 days |
| 99.7 % | 26 hours |
| 99.99 % | 52 minutes |
| 99.999 % | 5 minutes |
Sometimes System Availability is described in plain text like the following: The database servers must be available 5 days a week, from 6 am to midnight or 24×7.
Acceptable Data Loss
As example: No more than 15 minutes of data entry can be lostMean time to recover (MTTR)
As example: In the event of a disaster, the systems should be back up and running within one hour.Mean time between failures (MTBF)
As example: A failure should not occur more than once a month.Performance
As example: Transaction response time should not exceed 4 seconds.These Service Level Agreement (SLA) elements above are required in order to develop SLA, and then design systems and processes to meet customer expectations.
Design systems and processes to meet SLA expectations
What’s important at this point is to understand the need to make design and infrastructure decisions in the context of meeting Service Level Agreements (SLA). In architecting a new database system the SLA targets can be usually achieved with different technical solutions in scope of your available budget (see next chapter).Designing a highly available system involves taking various elements and combining them to suit your business needs and requirements. I mention below these elements that you need to consider especially in Oracle database environment design.
High Availability
Strictly speaking, High Availability (HA) gives consideration to the single points of failure in your system and eliminates them through redundancy.Examples are: redundant HW, SAN/ASM, RAC databases
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery extends the concept of High Availability (HA) beyond single points of failure by providing secondary elements that can be brought into play when the primary elements fail.Example is Standby databases.
Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture
Implementing High Availability (HA) to address single points of failure and disaster recovery to address system failure leads down the path of maximum availability architecture (MAA).Downtime
The key to determine which elements of High Availability (HA) are appropriate for your site is how much downtime you can tolerate; this includes unexpected as well as planned downtime. Downtime is usually differentiated by 2 types. Unplanned down time is primarily the result of computer failures or data failures. Planned down time is primarily due to data changes or system changes.
Planned database downtime is primarily due to data changes or system changes
Obtain the budget for building the database environment
After you made the database design proposal, you have to obtain the budget to implement the database environment that can meet the agreed SLA. Considering different optimal technical solutions, your goal is to build a database system that meets the required SLA level for least money. Cost comparison of options helps in achieving realistic expectations when developing a proper database system. Bear in mind, the cost of a database system considerably increases the closer you want to reach 100% of availability. In other words, removal of each “9” from the uptime target significantly reduces the cost of building an environment that meets the target, as Table below helps demonstrate.Item |
SAN Snapshot backup | Native DB backup |
| Licensing | €28,000 | €5,000 |
| Training | €14,000 | 0 |
| Storage | €45,000 | €10,000 |
| Total Cost | €87,000 | €15,000 |
Be prepare for a disaster
Generally speaking there are 2 options of dealing with potential disaster: (a) expect and plan for it; or (b) do nothing hoping for the best. And I strongly do not recommend following the second one!Often IT personnel is not prepared for disaster or unplanned downtime at all. Either they do not build IT systems to tolerate a disaster right from the beginning. Or if this step is done, with time and changes done on the systems the availability solutions and procedures that were implemented at the beginning simply do not work anymore. So many times I’ve heard from IT colleagues: “It worked somehow in the past. Why we need to improve or test it again?” But it’s the same like thinking I do not need to lock my car because it has never been robbed. If it’s happened however, it’s already late!
Ensure system disaster recovery planning and testing. I strongly recommend focusing in your planning and testing on every possible unplanned downtime case. Prepare solutions and procedures to avoid or at least mitigate database downtime.
So that was an prelude that gave an idea about the things that should be considered like Service Level Agreement (SLA), Availability Level, downtime, etc. to start speaking about Oracle database High Availability (HA) solutions in the next articles.
