[Deploying Sakai] automated failover options for Sakai and Oracle

[Crossman, Eric]

Hi All,

We are doing some brainstorming exercises here at UF to evaluate how we can improve reliability of some of our highly visible services. I'm wondering if any other schools are doing Oracle failover with either Data Guard or RAC. If so, are you failing over automatically or manually with DBA intervention?  Here at UF, we are using  Data Guard but our failover is currently manual. We did attempt to utilize a data guard aware jdbc connection string but found it was not reliable enough to use in production.

>From my own research, it seems the recommended approach is to use Oracle's own database connection pool which can receive "fast connection failover" signals from the respective databases to know that it needs to reconnect its connections to the surviving database. I did also notice that there is an unresolved JIRA issue (KNL-1000) to modify Sakai to be able to use other connection pool implementations besides Apache DBCP. So it seems we wouldn't be able to use Oracle's Universal Connection Pool (UCP) until such a patch is available. Are there other options in the interim?

Eric Crossman
University of Florida

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