Applications can take advantage of many Oracle Database, Oracle Clusterware, and Oracle RAC features and capabilities to minimize or mask any failure in the Oracle RAC environment. For example, you can:
Remove TCP/IP timeout waits by using the VIP address to connect to the database.
Create detailed operational procedures and ensure you have the appropriate support contracts in place to match defined service levels for all components in the infrastructure.
Take advantage of the Oracle RAC Automatic Workload Management features such as connect time failover, Fast Connection Failover, Fast Application Notification, and the Load Balancing Advisory.
See Also:
Workload Management with Dynamic Database Services for more details.
Place voting disks on separate volume groups to mitigate outages due to slow I/O throughput. To survive the failure of x voting devices, configure 2x + 1 mirrors.
Use Oracle Database Quality of Service Management (Oracle Database QoS Management) to monitor your system and detect performance bottlenecks.
Place OCR with I/O service times in the order of 2 milliseconds (ms) or less.
Tune database recovery using the FAST_START_MTTR_TARGET initialization parameter.
Use Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) to manage database storage.
Ensure that strong change control procedures are in place.
Check the surrounding infrastructure for high availability and resiliency, such as LDAP, NIS, and DNS. These entities affect the availability of your Oracle RAC database. If possible, perform a local backup procedure routinely.
Use Oracle Enterprise Manager to administer your entire Oracle RAC environment, not just the Oracle RAC database. Use Oracle Enterprise Manager to create and modify services, and to start and stop the cluster database instances and the cluster database.
See Also:
Oracle Database 2 Day + Real Application Clusters Guide for more information about using Oracle Enterprise Manager in an Oracle RAC environment
Use Recovery Manager (RMAN) to back up, restore, and recover data files, control files, server parameter files (SPFILEs) and archived redo log files. You can use RMAN with a media manager to back up files to external storage. You can also configure parallelism when backing up or recovering Oracle RAC databases. In Oracle RAC, RMAN channels can be dynamically allocated across all of the Oracle RAC instances. Channel failover enables failed operations on one node to continue on another node. You can start RMAN from Oracle Enterprise Manager Backup Manager or from the command line.
See Also:
Configuring Recovery Manager and Archiving for more information about using RMAN
If you use sequence numbers, then always use CACHE with the NOORDER option for optimal performance in sequence number generation. With the CACHE option, however, you may have gaps in the sequence numbers. If your environment cannot tolerate sequence number gaps, then use the NOCACHE option or consider pre-generating the sequence numbers. If your application requires sequence number ordering but can tolerate gaps, then use CACHE and ORDER to cache and order sequence numbers in Oracle RAC. If your application requires ordered sequence numbers without gaps, then use NOCACHE and ORDER. The NOCACHE and ORDER combination has the most negative effect on performance compared to other caching and ordering combinations.
Note:
If your environment cannot tolerate sequence number gaps, then consider pre-generating the sequence numbers or use the ORDER and CACHE options.
If you use indexes, then consider alternatives, such as reverse key indexes to optimize index performance. Reverse key indexes are especially helpful if you have frequent inserts to one side of an index, such as indexes that are based on insert date.