Some issues to think about here: Do they really need all the data from production? Or are they just saying that without any justification...
Do they know what questions they are going to ask? Or is this a fishing expedition. Are they going to understand ad-hoc development will continue to not occur in production? Do they understand the complexity and cost associated this what they are asking for? And can they justify the resource requirements and cost with a ROI study? Are these request coming from users or management? Did someone recently go to some buiness intelligence conference? Anyone download some sexy new query tool? How many users is "quite a few"? Frankly Walt I would be careful about opening that "ad-hoc" door. the next thing you will have is a real CF on your hands and lots of regrets. I would aim for a data mart and extracting the information needed for specific uses that have actual business value. Charge them to give specific examples that are valuable to the company. Unless of course this is a true vendor-customer relationship and they are going to pay actual money for this. Then sell away...If it is an internal "customer" then I would be cautious. Having said that you can make a copy of the database during backups and use to create a new instance of the same db. We do that here. Catch is all that work and disk space goes unused. because the users "need" real time data access for thier ad-hoc activity and reports... Brad O. -----Original Message----- Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 11:29 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Okay, we have a request for quite a few of our customers for read-only copies of their databases they can do their ad-hoc queries on. These read-only databases need to as closely matched to the production database as possible, i.e., exact, from their point of view. I've looked into some options to do this. Since we're going to 9i fairly soon I was thinking of setting up logical standbys, but I've read some pretty bad things about logical standbys -- typical new buggy Oracle product. I've also started into looking at basic replication: maybe just simple updateable snapshots refreshed every now and then. So, for the past couple of days I've gone through Metalink, Technet, and the mail archives on Oracle-l trying to learn about simple, basic, readonly replication. The problem is, all of the manuals, white papers, etc. I've found don't deal with how to set up and administer simple basic replication. It's all mixed in with multi-master replication, Advanced Replication, and stuff like that. I'm new to replication and would like to basically start learning the basics for basic replication, basically. Can anyone point me to a document that talks about basic read-only replication only? Or am I fooling myself into thinking there is such a thing? Thanks, --Walt Weaver Bozeman, Montana -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Weaver, Walt INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Odland, Brad INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
