This book is intended to be a quick reference guide to Oracle 11g Streams. Along those lines we are going to quickly go over the basics and have you up and running with a simple Oracle 11g Streams environment in the first sections of this book. This is because we believe that hands-on is the only true and meaningful way of developing an expertise with a technology. Then we will evolve the simple Streams environment to cover areas of concern related to more advanced configurations and the administration of an Oracle 11g Streams configuration in a production environment. The authors do make an attempt to direct the reader to specific Oracle documentation, should the reader desire additional detailed information.
You should also be aware that this book is meant to be read chapter to chapter for the first three chapters. This provides you with the foundation that is needed for later chapters. If you have a background with Oracle Streams, consider jumping to specific configuration chapters (Chapter 4 through to Chapter 6).
Here is the high level layout of the chapters.
- Chapter 1: All the pieces: The parts of an Oracle 11g Streams Environment examines the different components of Oracle Streams and how they work together.
- Chapter 2: Plot Your Course: Design Considerations provides the reader with guidelines on what details to consider when designing a Streamed environment, as well as a design aid to help you to organize your environment requirements.
- Chapter 3: Prepare the Rafts and Secure Your Gear: The pre-work before configuring Oracle 11g Streams begins the implementation process by successfully configuring both Source and Target databases to support Streams Capture, Propagation, and Apply processes.
- Chapter 4: Single-Source Configuration looks at configuring single source streams replication using Enterprise Manager DB Console and review the PL/SQL API calls being issued behind the scenes.
- Chapter 5: N-Way Replication takes the concepts for setting up a single-source configuration and applies it to a multi-master, or N-Way Replication environment configuration.
- Chapter 6: Get Fancy with Streams Advanced Configurations covers the popular advanced features of Oracle Streams including Subsetting, Tags, Rules, Rule-based transformations, and 11gR2 new features such as Change tables, and XSTREAMS.
- Chapter 7: Document What You Have and How It Is Working addresses issues and concerns associated with losing a key member of a team responsible for a Streamed (or any) environment by creating and maintaining proper documentation.
- Chapter 8: Dealing with the Ever Constant Tides of Change consists of to sections. The first section of this chapter looks at the impacts of, and dealing with, expectedly changing your existing Streamed environment and what you can do to minimize the impact. The second section addresses troubleshooting techniques and what to look for when things "stop working" due to any unexpected changes.
- Chapter 9: Appendix and Glossary is the catch-all chapter dealing with subjects that did not quite fit into the previous chapters. It covers subjects that the authors wanted to mention but did not have the time/resources to fully develop into a standalone chapter.