By implementing and using Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) best practices, you can provide high availability for the Oracle database and related technology.
This chapter contains the following topics:
Designing and implementing a high availability architecture can be a daunting task given the broad range of Oracle technologies and hardware, software, and deployment options. A successful effort begins with clearly defined and thoroughly understood business requirements. Oracle Database High Availability Overview Chapter 2, "High Availability and Data Protection – Getting From Requirements to Architecture," helps you map your specific business requirements to one of four MAA reference architectures. Later chapters in Oracle Database High Availability Overview describe how each MAA reference architecture provides various benefits and tradeoffs in addressing unplanned outages and planned maintenance activities. Finally, Chapter 7, "High Availability Architectures," compares and contrasts the different architectures. We highly recommend reviewing Oracle Database High Availability Overview to choose the most appropriate MAA reference architecture and to learn how Oracle Engineered Systems and other architectural decisions can optimize your return on investment.
Oracle High Availability (HA) best practices help you deploy a highly available architecture throughout your enterprise. Having a set of configuration and operational best practices helps you achieve high availability and reduces the cost associated with the implementation and ongoing maintenance of your enterprise. Also, employing best practices can optimize usage of system resources.
By implementing the HA best practices you can:
Reduce the cost of creating an Oracle Database high availability system by following detailed guidelines on configuring your database, storage, application failover, backup and recovery. See Chapter 2, "Overview of Configuration Best Practices" for more information.
Use operational best practices to maintain your system. See Chapter 6, "Operational Prerequisites to Maximizing Availability" in Oracle Database High Availability Overview for more information.
Detect and quickly recover from unscheduled outages caused by computer failure, storage failure, human error, or data corruption. For more information, see Section 4.1.6, "Protect Against Data Corruption" and Chapter 12, "Recovering from Unscheduled Outages".
Eliminate or reduce downtime due to scheduled maintenance such as database patches or application upgrades as described in Chapter 13, "Reducing Downtime for Planned Maintenance".
Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) is Oracle's best practices blueprint based on Oracle High Availability (HA) technologies, extensive validation performed by the Oracle MAA development team, and the accumulated production experience of customers who have successfully deployed business critical applications on Oracle.
MAA covers Oracle products within the following technologies:
Oracle Database as described in this book
Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle WebLogic Server
Oracle Applications (Siebel, Peoplesoft, E-Business Suite)
Oracle Collaboration Suite
Oracle Enterprise Manager
MAA reference architectures: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum as described in Oracle Database High Availability Overview.
This book, Oracle Database High Availability Best Practices primarily focuses on high availability best practices for the Oracle Database. There are also other components for which you might want to consider Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) best practices. For more information go to:
http://www.oracle.com/goto/MAA
See:
Oracle Fusion Middleware Disaster Recovery Guide for information about Oracle Fusion Middleware high availability
Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for information about backup and recovery for Oracle Fusion Middleware
The goal of MAA is to achieve the optimal HA architecture at the lowest cost and complexity. MAA provides:
Best practices that span the Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Applications, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and solutions provided by Oracle Partners.
Accommodates a range of business requirements with MAA reference architectures to support all Oracle databases.
Leverages lower-cost servers and storage.
Uses hardware and operating system independent features and evolves with new Oracle versions and features. The only exceptions are Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine which has specific and customized configuration and operating practices optimized for Oracle Database.
Makes high availability best practices as widely applicable as possible considering the various business service level agreements (SLA).
Uses the Oracle Grid Infrastructure with Database Server Grid and Database Storage Grid to provide highly resilient, scalable, and lower cost infrastructures.
Provides the ability to control the length of time to recover from an outage and the amount of acceptable data loss from any outage.
For more information about MAA and documentation about best practices for all MAA components, visit the MAA website at