Continuous Database Availability

Abstract

In today’s business environment, it is usual that data relevant to business is stored on different hardware, inside different databases, different data warehouses, inside as well as outside of the organization. Accuracy, quality, timeliness, and especially availability of such distributed data make crucial role in the process of business managing. Now, one of the biggest challenges is to ensure continuous availability of that data, even in critical and disaster situations. This chapter gives a short overview of the most used solutions for database availability that have become industry standards and gives examples of implementation of these standards by, in this moment, three main database vendors: Oracle (Oracle 11g), IBM (DB2 Version 9.5) and Microsoft (SQL Server 2008).