More
than 600,000 professionals depend on First American RES to
provide them with the information they need; although not all of
those individuals access the system at the same time, First
American typically has thousands of concurrent users on the
system at any one time. And although First American works hard
to collect, consolidate, and manage data from approximately
3,000 U.S. counties, it wouldn't be a Fortune 500 company if it
couldn't accurately track and bill each of its hundreds of
thousands of customers.
"We
have multiple billing databases that are key to our
business," says Liu. "Because we charge users by how
many searches they do and how much time they spend searching our
database, we need to ensure availability. So for each of the
billing databases, we've used Oracle Data Guard to set up
standby databases for protection."
According
to Liu, First American RES uses two standby databases for each
billing database, and it uses the Maximum Performance setting
within Data Guard to push the transactions as quickly as
possible to the remote site so that during a failover, all the
data will already be on the standby databases. "The process
actually goes very quickly. We can have all the users, more than
2,000 of them concurrently, fail over to our standby site in
less than a few minutes without losing any transactions at
all."
Key
to deploying any type of high-availability solution is testing.
"Before we implemented our high-availability solution, we
built a testing and staging environment in which we could mimic
failures and cause the database or server to crash and fail over
to the standby database," says Liu. Apparently the testing
and extra work have paid off. Since the company deployed the
system, it has had two hardware-related failures, and both times
the Data Guard failover process worked successfully and within
minutes—thousands of users were shifted to the new primary
server without a problem.
