Oracle Dataguard – Low downtime for Maintanance and Upgrade

Any business application has to undergo different phases of maintenance and also upgrade. Such an operation is always associated with down time. Management of such an operation always associated with the following thoughts…..

1. When can be the downtime? Usually business agrees on the low business volume period – Holidays/dead night odd hours…
2. What will be the downtime?
3. What if there are hiccups during the process with increase downtime and how such scenario can be explained to business /customers /vendors ?
4. What will be the support of Vendor / OEM during downtime (odd hours)? Don’t ever assume [ ass-u-me 😉 ] that their best engineers and supports will be available in the odd time…If so you are the luckiest person in the world.
5. If the activity runs more than 12 hours and your business is 24X7 then how do you manage the shifts of consultants/engineers so that you always have most effective team on pre-activity, activity and post-activity-support phase.

I am sure that the following diagram will give you understanding on the same, and majority of the tricks will work in most of the case with a slight variation on case to case basis.