Continuous Database Availability
The main characteristics of today’s business, mostly owing to Internet and web technologies, are globalization and continuous availability (24/7/365). Although information technology (IT) is the one of the main driving forces in enabling such a business, ensuring continuous business availability is still one the biggest challenge for IT itself. This chapter presents necessity of enabling continuous database availability and different approaches used in ensuring this. Today’s huge amount of different variety of data stored in voluminous databases and data warehouses has to be readily accessible by Internet and sophisticated communications network. Gathering customer data, vendor information, minute financial measurements, product data, retail sell-through data and manufacturing metrics become one of the most important organization goals. The final result is that organization had to accumulate terabytes of data on increasingly large storage systems, with the main purpose to enable users who by different software applications use that data in order to improve their AbstrAct