Oracle MAA SIG September Meeting
Join us for our quarterly Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) SIG meeting!
Bulletproof Your Next Database Upgrade!
Presented by Sean Scott, Viscosity North America
Production patching and upgrades expose organizations to significant risks. Lower environments don’t reliably predict post-upgrade behavior if their topologies, infrastructure, and configuration aren’t identical to production targets or when synthetic load profiles don’t accurately mimic their real-world counterparts. What if there was a way to test your next upgrade in production?safely and repeatedly?using actual production loads? To compare the before and after performance of identical systems, side-by-side, in AWR reports? To practice and perfect the upgrade process, catching and fixing performance issues before go-live? These capabilities are available and easier to achieve than you might think. Learn how to bulletproof your next upgrade, replacing hope and luck with Data Guard Snapshot Standby and Real Application Testing! In this session, I explain:
- How to use Data Guard to protect a standby database and prepare it for upgrade
- Leverage Real Application Testing to generate and replay production workloads
- Capture database activity and preserve performance metrics for comparison
- Revert the standby database to its original state
Elevator pitch
“I don’t understand! It worked in the test environment!” Ah, but test is rarely anything like production! Differences in processing power, storage, and configuration (RAC vs. non-RAC, Exadata vs. non-Exadata, with and without Data Guard, etc.) affect procedures and test results, potentially leading to extended outages, days spent tracking down and resolving performance issues, lost revenues, and reduced customer confidence. The only way to guarantee significant changes’ success on the production database is to test them on it! This might seem like a far-fetched proposal, but it isn’t outlandish or difficult in practice.
