Before we begin, huge kudos to my colleague Sebastian Solbach for working on this blog post.
Introduction
Mission-critical applications rely on 24/7 availability to maintain business operations. The database is the most critical component in every software architecture; therefore, it is compelling to implement a strategy that maximizes data availability, reliability, and protection. Oracle Data Guard is the best choice for providing such protection because it maintains a synchronized standby database at a remote site to ensure fast recovery and data protection. The standby database can take over the application workload from an impacted primary database at any time while guaranteeing data consistency and accessibility, regardless of the type of failure, outage, or network partition.
Data transferred from the primary to standby is continuously validated to prevent data corruption, lost writes, and ransomware attacks. Detecting and correcting data corruption usually involves restoring from backup or undertaking complicated repairs, which can lead to extended downtime. Oracle Active Data Guard is unique in its ability to fix corrupted data online, preventing any disruption to the application.
Enable Data Guard in Oracle Cloud
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers can take advantage of the large global Oracle Cloud region footprint to ensure disaster recovery for their deployments across different regions and geographies. Oracle Cloud provides a simple and automated way to deploy Oracle Data Guard using the OCI Console, OCI CLI, SDKs, or REST APIs. Among other Oracle Cloud database services that support Data Guard configurations, Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure offers customers a low entry point to Oracle Exadata and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), allowing customers to benefit from built-in high availability, scalability, and performance. Ensuring disaster recovery by creating an Oracle Data Guard or Active Data Guard standby database is a matter of very few clicks as follows:
Navigate to the Database details page on your Container Database.
Scroll down to the Resources section, select Data Guard Associations, and click on the Enable Data Guard button.
Select the region, availability domain, and the VM cluster for your Data Guard standby database.
Choose the Data Guard type: Active Data Guard or Data Guard.
Active Data Guard allows offloading read-mostly work to the standby database, freeing up valuable resources on the primary database to handle more read-write operations. Active Data Guard facilitates seamless rolling database updates, including major-version upgrades, without application downtime and provides additional data protection including automatic block repair and application continuity which can seamlessly replay in-flight transactions.
Next, choose an existing Database Home, or create a new one.
Finally, choose a unique database name (optional), enter the database SYS user password, and click the Enable Data Guard button.
During standby database creation, the primary database is fully functional and accessible to applications. Details of the standby database are visible in the Data Guard Associations section after standby database creation is completed.
Click on the peer database link to access the standby database details page.
Enabling Data Guard for Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure, Exadata Cloud@Customer, and Base Database Service in Oracle Cloud works similarly.
Oracle MAA Best Practices Included
Over the last few decades, Oracle has collaborated with customers to design and deploy 24×7 architectures based on the Oracle database. The experience that Oracle has gained in these projects has led to many best practices, which Oracle documents and provides to customers as part of the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA).
The automated Data Guard setup in Oracle Cloud already incorporates the MAA best practices by default. It ensures the correct size, number, and place of the standby redo log files, creates the necessary TEMP tablespace files on switchover or failover, configures the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) on the standby site, and sets up the database parameters in accordance with Oracle Data Guard best practices.
Furthermore, the Cloud automation enhanced the Oracle Data Guard integration with Oracle Multitenant operations, covering all PDB cloning scenarios, automatically creating the PDB data files on the standby database, and adding database services for read-write on the primary database and read-only on the standby database for each PDB.
Platform Migrations
Oracle Data Guard provides an easy option to migrate your databases from one platform to another with zero to minimal downtime by creating a standby database on the new platform, switching over, and terminating the former primary database. See How to move your Exadata Cloud Service Databases to X9M with Zero Downtime for more details.
Conclusion
To summarize, Oracle Cloud provides a simple and automated way to create an Oracle Data Guard configuration to ensure data protection and disaster recovery for your mission-critical applications, incorporating Oracle MAA best practices by default. Additionally, the standby database can be used for backups and read-mostly workloads, freeing up valuable resources on the primary database, among other benefits provided by Oracle Active Data Guard.
Database Heartbeat 