Because you rely on e-commerce for a significant part of your income, you really need to make sure that your systems are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  The cost of application downtime is staggeringly high, not only do you lose sales, but your reputation takes a hit as well.  Gartner Group estimates that enterprises lose millions of dollars for every hour that they are offline.  And for this reason, enterprises need to make sure that their databases are always available and easily manageable.

One way to ensure both is to give users full access to your database even during a data reorganization, and this is where Oracle helps.

Oracle Database 12c has the Online Data Reorganization & Redefinition feature, which gives you the ability to change physical attributes of your tables and transform table and data structure without taking your database offline.  What all these lead to is better data availability, faster query performance and response time, as well as optimized used of disk space.  Ultimately, these would help you make application upgrade a much faster, safer and easier process.

With the Online Data Reorganization & Redefinition feature, you can redefine your tables while it is online.  This means that the table being changed is accessible by write and read operations.  Database and system administrators could start the redefinition process and then they can synchronize the interim table in order for it to include the changes made to the original table.  What’s more, it is possible to use the data or validate it while it is undergoing redefinition.  This helps you make sure that the upgrade process runs without a hitch.  Your administrators will have the final say when to switch over to the newly modified table from the original table.  This switching process takes a very short time and is not affected by the size of your table or no matter how intricate your redefinition is.

After your redefinition, what you get is an entirely new table with improved efficiency in its data block layout.

You can use the Online Data Reorganization & Redefinition feature via the Oracle Enterprise Manager.  Or you could also use it using the SQL Plus command line interface.

There are two ways to do it, depending on the type of reorganization you want to carry out.  One is to use DBMS_REDEFINITION, or you could also use SQL CREATE/ALTER TABLE and INDEX commands.

If you want to be able to reorganize your data or redefine your table without needing to take your database offline while still ensuring that your users get access to the latest data and information, then you should definitely consider using the Online Data Reorganization & Redefinition feature in Oracle Database 12c. Four Cornerstone has Oracle consulting services that put you in touch with a team of Oracle experts who have decades of experience working for a variety of companies belonging to different industries.  These Oracle certified experts help you avoid the guesswork.  Even if you have been using Oracle Database 11g, you will still need to learn what’s new with Online Data Reorganization & Redefinition in Oracle Database 12c.

Contact Four Cornerstone today!

Photo by Oracle.