Graceful switchover in standard edition

I have implemented a lot of standby databases in Oracle Standard Edition version. Until now anyone of our customer asked for Graceful switchover, but at least it happen.



I spend a few hours thinking if it is possible and when a draft of solution came into my mind I have made a research on Oracle Metalink and I have found article dated 1999 about Graceful Switchover in Oracle 8 and 8i – it is interesting because it was before DataGuard and this functionality had been establish (Metalink Doc ID: 76450.1 Graceful Switchover and Switchback of Oracle Standby Databases).



Findings and my original idea are very close – to switchover a database it is required to copy an online redo logs and control file. Everything looks straight forward when we have a database file, online redo logs and control files on filesystem. But what in case of database placed on ASM? Is it possible? In ASM there is no possibility to copy redo logs. Yes, it is. This is some kind of workaround and it required a little more work but I was able to perform a switchover between two databases using ASM.



A solution for ASM based databases is using a mirroring feature for online redo logs. A new member of each group has to be placed on filesystem and not on ASM disk group. After that change we are able to perform a graceful switchover using steps described in Oracle document. At the end an additional (temporary) member of each redo group can be deleted.

Nice bug

Today I was trying to enable automatic patch update in 11g.
I opened a configuration page and typed my email and password, when I pressed Apply
button I saw a nice information in red:

Invalid Data - Error: apply failed ORA-12899: value too large for column
"SYSMAN"."MGMT_ARU_CREDENTIALS"."ARU_USERNAME" (actual: 80, maximum: 64)
ORA-06512: at "SYSMAN.MGMT_CREDENTIAL", line 1482 ORA-06512: at line 1

On Metalink your account is your email, so all DBA's with long first or surnames have a problem ;)
I have make a manual research and I have found a solution - use shorter account name.

BTW this is solved in 11.1.0.7
From Metalink note 470696.1

The next Release of DB Control (11.1.0.7) will include the fix. The maximum length of the Metalink Username will be 255 characters (as Metalink username can have up to 255 characters).

I will try that.

update:
Even in 11.1.0.7 on Linux I cound not use my metalink account.