Oi Jose Carlos,
Ainda não trabalhei efetivamente com Standby na versão 9, só auxiliando alguns amigos, mas sem presença. Então verifiquei na documentação oficial e achei o seguinte:
3.2 Role Management
When the primary site fails, such as when a system or software failure occurs, you may need to transition one of its corresponding standby sites to take over the primary role by performing a failover operation. Even in the absence of a disaster, you may have reason to perform a switchover operation to direct one of the standby sites to assume the role of being the primary site, while the former primary site assumes the role of being a standby site.
Without the broker, failover and switchover operations are manual processes that can be automated only by using script-based solutions. For example, if a physical standby site is in read-only mode (log apply services are offline) when a failure occurs on the primary site, you must change the standby database to managed recovery mode, apply archived redo logs that have not yet been applied to the standby database, and fail over the standby database to the primary role.
The broker simplifies the switchover or failover operations by allowing you to invoke them through a single command and then coordinating role transitions on all sites in the configuration.
Creio que isso responderá sua pergunta. Na versão 9 não há um failover automático. Utilizando o Broker é possível simplificar o failover com poucos comandos. Se não errei na tradução, creio que é isso.
Segue a URL da consulta:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B105 … source.htm
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Braga