Grid DBA

Recently I was running some tests in my lab environment consisting of two Oracle 11.2.0.3 databases on separate RHEL 6.2 VMs. The databases were configured in a Data Guard configuration and used ASM as storage. However, I ran into an issue where my standby database was becoming out of sync with the primary database because the standby was out of disk space. At the time I couldn't request additional storage for my standby (that's what happens when you work at 1:00 am while everyone works normal hours) and I needed to complete my testing. The standby server had some NFS mounted shares that had plenty of space however. This is where social interaction is of benefit because I can recall having several discussions with fellow colleagues on twitter about choosing to use NFS as ASM devices and under what conditions one would choose such a route. Yury also wrote up a blog  post about it. This seemed like a good opportunity to test it out. Only this time I will be mixing ASM block de...

Just a quick note to self when adding datafiles located on ASM when using Data Guard. If the initialization parameter STANDBY_FILE_MANAGEMENT is set to AUTO then any datafile added on the primary database is automatically propagated to the standby site. Before adding the datafile on the primary site you need to verify that adequate disk space is available in the disk groups on both primary and standby. If not done, then your managed recovery will cease to operate thus causing risks to your disaster recovery database. Consider the example below. Datafile gets added on the primary database. ALTER TABLESPACE "FTSBCAUDIT" ADD DATAFILE '+DG_DATA' SIZE 8G REUSE AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 100M MAXSIZE UNLIMITED Fri Oct 21 18:49:22 2011 Starting control autobackup Control autobackup written to DISK device         handle '/archivelogs/ftsora01/ftpprd/c-117026708-20111021-13' Completed: ALTER TABLESPACE "FTSBCAUDIT" ADD DATAFILE '+DG_DATA' SIZE 8G REUSE ...