Best Practices - Oracle Data Guard
Switchover & Failover
Introduction
Oracle Data Guard oers two easy-to-use methods to
handle planned and unplanned outages of the
production site. These methods are called switchover
and failover respectively. They can be easily initiated
directly through SQL, or the Data Guard Manager GUI or
Data Guard Broker’s command line interface (DGMGRL).
This article highlights best practices for role transitions
using Oracle9i Data Guard and Oracle 10g Data Guard.
Results Summary
Adequate understanding and testing of Data Guard
switchover and failover are key to meeting service
availability requirements. If a role transition does not
have stringent time restrictions, then Enterprise
Manager is recommended because of its inherent ease-
of-use. With physical standby database, we have
observed switchover and failover times of less than a
minute in 9i and 10g using the best practices. With
