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Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. Defining Availability

2. Redundancy: The Key to Carrier-Grade Availability

3. Preserving Application State: Two Techniques

4. Highly Available Database Managers

5. A Sidebar on How an RDBMS Works

6. Understanding Safeness Levels

7. Data Loss Considerations

8. MTTR Considerations

9. Application Throughput Considerations

10. Three-Way Tradeoff Summary

Self-Test

Test Answers

Glossary

PDF of this tutorial

In many areas, including the network infrastructure, developers are challenged with the task of building applications that run for very long periods without appreciable downtime. These are called highly available applications. Because they often manage large amounts of data, such applications are well-served by a high-availability database management system (HA-DBMS). This paper discusses the value of an HA-DBMS, and some key tradeoffs which the designer must make in using an HA-DBMS to support a highly available application.