Regarding the article by Donald K. Burleson.

A few thing I would like to address in this article. Here are the points as I see it:

Alternative to RAC for Continuous Availability (Not Scalability which RAC is designed for).

1. Cold, Warm or Hot Standby comes to mind and would be a better solution than he provided. I have set this up on 8i and have done a manual worm standby in 7.3.4. It works. http://otn.oracle.com/products/rdb/htdocs/dbms/hotstandby.html

2. If you don't need a geographic separation of your databases. You can use Oracle Fail Safe. Gives you database fail over and uptime. You do loose any uncommitted transactions.

3. As far his recommendations, He talks about using cross database links. At first I thought this was a good Idea. Then I tried it. What happens when one database is down? Weather it’s a crash or a planned downtime, if one database is down, transactions fail. That’s no good. Now you have doubled your chances of a failure taking down your application.

Thanks

Randy

-- Randy (rlrichar@yahoo.com), July 30, 2002