Over the recent weeks pretty much most of my time has been spent debugging and working with Dataguard related issues and i thought i'd start this post about some notes
1. Know thy purpose.
Before deciding what type of dataguard environment you want to setup , Make sure you understand the business requirements and plan accordingly. If the purpose is DR only use Physical Dataguard. If the purpose is business reporting , use Logical Dataguard.
2. Understand the Load.
It is very important to understand the logic and the business reason behind the setup. Often people recommend a Dataguard setup without actually working through the requirements. This can lead to a cheaper but totally unusable solution which might require lots of rework . Logical Dataguard is much prone to such issues since users expect it to be up and available for performing read only activities and also expect it to be in sync real-time.
Part 2 will go into some technical details on trying to troubleshoot Dataguard issues and how to identify potiential issues .