Oracle DATAGUARD some IMP POINTS :

1) Oracle DATAGUARD is a key component within Oracle that provides an EFFICIENT

DISASTER RECOVERY SOLN.
2) It enables the CREATION, MAINTENANCE and MONITORING of Transactional Consistent
Copies of the PRODUCTION dbs at an alternate location.
3) Production DB refered as PRIMARY DB/SERVER.
4) Transactional Consistent Copies (DBs/SERVER) refered as STANDBY DBs/SERVER.
5) In 11gR2 we can Configure upto 30 STANDBY DBs/SERVER. (in 10g it is 9).
6) STANDBY dbs are 3 types :
-- Physical STANDBY dbs
-- SNAPSHOT STANDBY dbs
-- Logical STANDBY dbs
7) All the above 3 types of STANDBY dbs can be Oracle RAC or Single-Instance.
8) DATAGUARD configuration is dependent on what the business requirement of client.
9) From 11g we can implement a CROSS-PLATFORM (linux to windows and vice versa)
dataguard configuration.

Types of STANDBY databases :

-----------------------------
1) Physical STANDBY dbs.
2) SNAPSHOT STANDBY dbs.
3) Logical STANDBY dbs.

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1) Physical STANDBY dbs :
==========================
1) Physical STANDBY db is synchronized with the PRIMARY db.
2) It applied REDO data.
3) Physical STANDBY db is a BLOCK-FOR-BLOCK identical copy of the PRIMARY db.
4) Its prefered choice for DISASTER RECOVERY.

==========================
3) Logical STANDBY db :
==========================
Benefits of Logical STANDBY dbs :

-- Even with all the new features that Oracle 11g adds for Physical STANDBY
dbs (e.g Real Time Apply),
a Logical STANDBY db still offers some interesting alternatives for :
-- a) OFFLOADING a REPORTING workload,
-- b) Protection against PHYSICAL BLOCK CORRUPTION,
-- c) PATCHING, and
-- d) DISASTER Recovery purposes.

1) Effective System Resource Use.

2) Primary Database Workload Reduction.
3) Increased Data Protection.
4) Patching.

Limitations of Logical STANDBY dbs. :

--------------------------------------
-- While Logical STANDBY dbs have some excellent benefits, they have some
definite drawbacks as well,
including restrictions on UNSUPPORTED OBJECTS and DATATYPES, limited
support for DDL and DCL commands,
 there are some glaring implications for FAILOVER situations :

--A) UNSUPPORTED OBJECTS : A Logical STANDBY dbs cannot accept updates for
:
a) Any tables or sequences OWNED by SYS.
b) Any tables that use TABLE COMPRESSION.
c) Any tables that underle a MATERIALIZED VIEW.
d) Global Temporary Tables (GTTs).

--B) UNSUPPORTED DATA TYPES : Any Tables that are COMPRISED OF or whose
COLUMNS CONTAIN the UNSUPPORTED DATATYPES
cannot be updated in a Logical STANDBY
dbs :
a) Datatypes BFILE, ROWID and UROWID.
b) Any USER-DEFINED TYPEs.
c) MULTIMEDIA data types like Oracle Spatial, ORDDICOM, and
Oracle Text.
d) COLLECTIONS (e.g. nested tables, VARRAYs)
e) SecureFile LOBs
f) OBJECT RELATIONAL XMLTypes.
g) BINARY XML.