Jan 22, 2013

DBVisit Standby Review

Posted Jan 22, 2013
DBVisit Standby is a tool for creating standby database for Oracle db which ensures high availability and protection of data. This is very similar to what Oracle Data Guard does, but before you can use it, you have to upgrade to Enterprise Edition (EE) which costs money. This is the main selling point of DBVisit Standby because it can work with Oracle Standard Edition (SE).


The cost of Oracle 11g Enterprise is $47,500 / processor + first year support $10,500 which I cannot uncheck so it means it's mandatory. Oracle Data Guard costs $10,000 / processor + $2,200 first year support. The total cost of the Oracle Data Guard solution is a whopping $70,200!

Let's try to compute the cost of DBVisit solution. The cost of Oracle 11g Standard is $17,500 / processor + $3,850 first year support. The most expensive DBVisit Standby option is $14,342 + $3,586 for 1 year support. Total cost is $39,278, a 44% savings compared to Oracle Data Guard solution.

I haven't tried DBVisit personally, because I don't need it but upon checking the forums and blogs, the problems encountered by users are more of set-up related or something went wrong in the back-up process. I'm yet to find a major problem in data corruption, but according to DBVisit team in a forum post, it checks the integrity of the transferred archive log and if it does not match the original log, it retries until it reaches a threshold before it stops and notifications are sent.

In summary, seems DBVisit employs a comprehensive integrity check. And even if data were corrupted in the main destination, there are several ways to fix it since it has several backup mechanisms in place.

Initial impression is that I'm comfortable to use the product because aside from ensuring data integrity, it has good documentation, helpful community and active development team (in case something wrong happens). But again, this is just my impression.

I have checked the last 60 entries of DBVisit forums regarding technical issues, and almost all have a solution and a reply within 1-3 working days, sometimes they even release a new version within 1-2 days of the issue. They have a very active development team which responds to user concerns. This, in my opinion, is one of the most important strengths of DBVisit. I remember a different scenario when I was using Alfresco, I looked at their forums and many issues are left unresolved, even issues we personally encountered.

In this informal review (because I haven't tried the product personally), I'll give DBVisit Standby a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. -Manny



1 comment:

  1. Initial impression will be that will I am at ease make use of the item due to the fact besides being sure files strength, it offers excellent paperwork, helpful neighborhood as well as productive improvement group (in circumstance some thing completely wrong happens). Nevertheless again, this can be simply the impression.

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