Chapter 1, High Availability, serves as the most basic introduction to concepts of high availability with regard to how Oracle RAC comes into play. The chapter includes a comprehensive review of the core areas of high availability and disaster recovery as well as how the Oracle RAC technology fits into a strategy for implementing high availability. The chapter also includes a review of key Oracle technologies that complement Oracle RAC for a disaster recovery implementation.

Chapter 2, Oracle 11g RAC Architecture, provides a blueprint from concept to finish of how to design an Oracle 11g RAC environment from the hardware and storage layers to the software and database layers.

Chapter 3, Clusterware Installation, provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Oracle 11g RAC. The chapter explains all of the steps required for the installation of the Oracle 11g R1 RAC Clusterware and Oracle 11g R1 RDBMS binaries, as well as the latest 11g R2 RAC Clusterware (grid) and RDBMS binaries.

Chapter 4, Automatic Storage Management, discusses the key concepts for Oracle 11g Automatic Storage Management (ASM) technology and provides an overview of ASM features. For this chapter, we assume that you have already worked with the ASM Oracle database 10g environment.

Chapter 5, Managing and Troubleshooting Oracle 11g Clusterware, explains how to resolve complex problems with Oracle 11g RAC clusterware failures. We show you how to identify the root cause of Oracle Clusterware issues along with timely solutions based on case study methods.

Chapter 6, RAC Database Administration and Workload Management, provides a deep dive into various methods that are available to create and manage RAC databases. The workload management segment in this chapter further explains how your application can take advantage of running on the RAC database to improve overall performance and scalability. It also discusses most of the useful new features introduced in 11g R1 and 11g R2 versions.

Chapter 7, Backup and Recovery, shows you how to back up and recover the Oracle RAC environment using different approaches. In this chapter, the emphasis will be placed on backup and recovery using RMAN. However, we also briefly discuss the various methods along with the pros and cons of each of them. In addition, new features of RMAN within Oracle 11g R1 and 11g R2 along with OCR and voting disk backup and recovery are covered in great detail.

Chapter 8, Performance Tuning, first explains how the differences between an Oracle RAC cluster and a non-RAC single-instance Oracle database pose unique challenges to the Oracle database professional. This chapter will focus on how to tune a massively parallel Oracle RAC database, consisting of many instances residing on different nodes of a cluster and accessing the same disk files residing on shared disk storage.

Chapter 9, Oracle 11g Clusterware Upgrade, explains the pros and cons of an upgrade process as well as the possibilities during upgrade scenarios. We also demonstrate how to upgrade the Oracle 10g R2 clusterware to 11g R1 and then perform a second upgrade from 11g R1 to 11g R2 versions. Furthermore, we also explain how to downgrade Oracle Clusterware to a previous version.

Chapter 10, Real-world Scenarios, teaches you how to perform many common real-world business scenarios, such as adding and removing cluster nodes, as well as how to convert non-RAC Oracle databases to Oracle RAC and how to relocate an Oracle RAC database instance, which are key skills for an Oracle RAC database administrator.

Chapter 11, Enabling RAC for EBS, discusses how to implement RAC for the Oracle R12 E-Business Suite (EBS) environment. We look at the cases for why Oracle RAC would be suitable for an Oracle R12 EBS environment to achieve a scalable and resilient architecture.

Chapter 12, Maximum Availability, discusses the complete picture of solutions for Oracle to enable high availability and disaster recovery. A detailed explanation is provided of these key technologies, including Oracle Streams and Oracle Data Guard, and how they complement the Oracle 11g RAC environment. We then move into a few case studies that show you how to enable Data Guard and Streams for Oracle RAC environments.

Appendix, Additional Resources and Tools for the Oracle RAC Professional is a handy summary of beneficial My Oracle Support notes that can provide assistance for Oracle RAC environments.

Oracle 11g RAC is a complex technology that demands many resources, from logistical to hardware, to implement. This means that you will need multiple servers and technical resources to be carefully orchestrated in order to achieve a successful RAC implementation. In a sense, the Oracle RAC architect is a symphony conductor who must skillfully place all of the key chess pieces into motion to avoid failure and delays with the deployment. As many DBAs have no prior RAC exposure, we gently introduce the basic concepts first, in order to familiarize you with RAC, before jumping into the deep ocean of RAC administration. Have no fear, while RAC is a complex beast, it can be tamed. The only prerequisite is to have at least a basic understanding of Oracle database concepts and Oracle database administration before learning about RAC. It is also useful to have access to a test or sandbox environment to install and configure an RAC environment with the examples in the book. Nothing beats hands-on experience.

Having an Internet connection and Oracle database server while reading is extremely useful as well. We also recommend that if you want a virtual environment to set up and play with RAC, then you consult the many whitepapers written by Dr. Tim Hall (http://oracle-base.com) that provide detailed step-by-step instructions on how to download, install, and configure an Oracle 11g RAC environment in both virtual server and standalone environments.

If you are an Oracle DBA who wants to administer Real Application Clusters, then this book is for you. Basic understanding of Oracle DBA is required. No experience of RAC is required.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "$CRS_HOME\log\nodename\racg contains logfiles for the VIP and ONS resources".

A block of code will be set as follows:

$ clscfg -concepts
clscfg: EXISTING configuration version 3 detected.
clscfg: version 3 is 11G Release 1.
clscfg -- concepts and terminology

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# crsctl set css misscount 90
Configuration parameter misscount is now set to 90.

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "Click on Finish to commence the database creation process."

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