Cut Risk & Downtime in Oracle Database Migrations with Quest SharePlex

Hi, this is Clay Jackson, senior sales engineer here at Quest Software. I'm going to talk to you today about how to eliminate risk and downtime in Oracle database migration using our award-winning database replication tool, Quest SharePlex. And we start out with your source system, your current production environment, with your users and all your Oracle databases, and your new production environment, up here in the left, that's just disks and an operating system. Now, those disks and operating system can be different hardware. Solaris to Linux, AIX to cloud, it doesn't really matter to us or SharePlex, we can handle the [INAUDIBLE] conversion for you. We're going to start out by installing and configuring SharePlex on the source and the target and starting SharePlex on the source. We got a capture queue, and an export queue, and a post queue on the target. The post queue is just going to contain the transactions we're capturing and have them available to apply to the target, as I'll explain in a few minutes. Now, you're going to take a backup of your source system to a particular SCN. If you're just moving versions of Oracle or migrating to the same hardware, you can use RMAN or whatever you want to take that backup as long as it's consistent to an SCN. If you're changing hardware or doing some other work, you may need to use Export, you can use consistent=y, or you can make an intermediate copy of your database and backup that quiet copy of the database using Export, either way works fine. You're still capturing the transactions that occurred since that SCN here in the post queue and getting ready to move those over in the target. Once you're ready to move to target, you've got everything restored, everything's all set and ready to go, and you tell post to reconcile. Throw away the transactions prior to the SCN we remembered, and post the transactions after that SCN. You're going to catch up, you're going to apply all the old those old transactions, get the new database and new production looking exactly like the old production. You can then use SharePlex's compare and repair utility to make sure that it does look like the old production. Use compare built into the product, no additional fees, no additional issues there, just compare table name and it will tell you if they're different. And if they're different, we'll give you the SQL to fix them. Next thing you're going to do in order to eliminate the risk of migration and then having to fall back for whatever reason is you're going to start replication from the source, your new source, your new production, back to the old source or the old production, which is now a target. Again, you're not going to post the data, you're just going to hold it in the post queue, and there's really going to be no data there yet because there are no users. But at this point, you can also test your new production environment. You can make sure everything's working right, move some users over there, test it, and maybe you're going to want to repeat this process two or three times to get your timings down right and get everything [INAUDIBLE]. It doesn't matter because your users are still over here, they've seen no downtime yet at all. Once you're ready to actually move the users, you set them up and move them. Move becomes just simply changing DNS or telling people to log into a new system. You get your users over on the new system, and you're up and running. Replicating back to your old system in case you need it, heaven forbid you have to go back and fall back, you simply tell your users move back to the old environment and put them back there. No harm, no foul. You haven't lost any transactions. You've got all those transactions applied on the old system, and you can live to fight another day and try it again later. You can also test in that new environment and make sure that you don't have to failback. But if you do need to failback, that option is there for you and available. Additional resources should you need them, look at our quest.com SharePlex product page, and it will have all sorts of interesting videos and more information about it. Or give us a call, and let us give you a demo of how SharePlex can be used to help you migrate your data from one environment to another. Thank you very much for listening.