Book Image

Oracle 11g Streams Implementer's Guide

Book Image

Oracle 11g Streams Implementer's Guide

Overview of this book

From smaller businesses through to huge enterprises ñ users all over the world often require access to data 24 hours a day. Distributed database systems proliferate the world of data sharing providing an ability to access real-time data anywhere, anytime. Oracle Streams, a built-in feature of the Oracle database, is a data replication and integration feature critical to the success and wellbeing of enterprises in today's fast moving economy. This book provides the reader with solid techniques to master Oracle Streams technology and successfully deploy distributed database systems. This book quickly goes over the basics and gets you up and running with a simple Oracle 11g Streams environment. It will serve as an excellent companion to the Oracle Streams Administration Guide. It is intended for Oracle database architects and administrators, and provides in-depth discussion on must-know information for the design, implementation, and maintenance of an Oracle Streams environment. The book does not attempt to regurgitate all the information in the Oracle Streams Administration Guides, but rather provides additional clarification and explanation of design, implementation, and troubleshooting concepts that are often elusive in Streams documentation. It also identifies helpful tools and Oracle resources to add to your knowledge base, as well as tried and tested tricks and tips to help you tame Oracle Streams. The book starts by introducing and explaining the components of Oracle Streams and how they work together. It then moves on logically, helping you to determine your distributed environment requirements and design your Streams implementation to meet those requirements. Once these concepts are discussed, the book moves to configuration and basic implementation examples to help solidify those concepts. It then addresses advanced features such as tags, down-stream capture, and conflict resolution. You then move on to maintenance techniques such as documenting the environment, effectively planning and implementing changes to the environment, and monitoring and troubleshooting the environment. When you have studied the techniques and completed the hands-on examples, you will have an understanding of Oracle Streams' core concepts and functionally that will allow you to successfully design, implement, and maintain an Oracle Streamed environment.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Oracle 11g Streams Implementer's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Summary


This is the foundation chapter for the rest of this book. We went over the basics of what Streams can do and the background processes that make up a Streams environment. Those background processes being Capture, Propagate, and Apply. Knowing each of these processes well is crucial to implementing a robust production level Streams environment. Not knowing these background processes can cause you difficulties when setting up Streams and future problems. Instantiation was covered in this chapter to point out not only what it is but to also stress its importance in the Streams environment and its role in SCN synchronization.

Streams is also dependent on the hardware and network that it runs on. Having properly sized hardware is within a DBA's influence. The network is often beyond the DBA's control. As the network is so crucial to Streams, we included discussion on the impacts of network speed and stability on Streams performance.

We also went into what an LCR is and its function. An LCR contains the DMLs and/or DDLs that are sent from Source to Target. Not all DMLs and DDLs are supported by Streams and we showed how to quickly identify what objects are supported and those that are not (query DBA_STREAMS_UNSUPPORTED).

We began to go into the Oracle Architecture (and components needed to support Streams) and Streams Performance. Chapter 7 will cover capturing Streams performance statics because it deserves its own special place. We will go into detail about how to configure the database in Chapter 3 to support optimal performance. Finally, we focus on two new Oracle 11gR2 features: Streams Change tables and XSTREAMS.

Now that we have reviewed the components of Oracle Streams Replication, let us move on to Chapter 2 where we will explore the many, many things to consider and options available when designing your Streamed environment.