Introduction If you are working with Oracle Data Guard, you have probably wondered what actually gets transmitted between your primary and standby databases. Is it the redo data, the redo log files, or the entire data blocks themselves? It is an important distinction, and understanding it can help you troubleshoot performance issues, optimize your network…
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…
Introduction Oracle Database runs everywhere: on-premises, on Oracle Cloud, on non-Oracle Clouds, and in multicloud environments. For Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud and Oracle Database@Azure, automatic backups are available and recommended to Autonomous Recovery Service, which provides immutability by default. For Oracle databases running elsewhere, consider having an (additional) backup to OCI Object…
Introduction After creating a PDB on the primary in a Data Guard environment, the PDB gets also created on standby. However, the standby will still be missing a TEMP file. To create a TEMP file, I got a comment from a customer that they were switching over to standby to create the TEMP file, which…
Introduction Oracle Cloud Object Storage is a regional service, i.e., objects are stored in a specific Oracle Cloud region. You can enable cross-region replication to automatically sync your data to a remote region for redundancy, providing protection from a regional outage. This blog post describes how to configure cross-region replication, use the replicated Object Storage…
Introduction In addition to its data protection capabilities, Oracle Data Guard provides additional features for workload scale-out, backup offload, and online maintenance and upgrade operations. Some features require the Active Data Guard (ADG) option license, and some do not. Sometimes the “little things” you need to be aware of make the difference. This blog post…
Introduction After introducing Far Sync instances and discussing their benefits in previous blog posts, this blog post provides a step-by-step guide to building a Far Sync instance and adding it to an existing Data Guard configuration. Parameters and directory paths used here are examples to make the setup easy to understand. Choose appropriate parameters and…
Introduction Oracle Data Guard enables you to transport the redo to the standby database synchronously to ensure zero data loss. However, when the standby database is geographically too far, the latency becomes higher, impacting the commit response time and the transaction throughput at the primary database. Oracle Active Data Guard Far Sync can ensure zero…
Introduction FastSync and Far Sync seem to be very similar terms, especially in the spoken language. In my conversations, I have seen these terms being mixed up and even questions about using one OR the other. Indeed, FastSync and Far Sync are two different things that can be used independently or make perfect sense to…
Introduction Recently I have been asked whether AWS RDS for Oracle provides a solid disaster recovery solution using Read Replicas based on Oracle Active Data Guard. Oracle (Active) Data Guard is undoubtedly Oracle’s most comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery solution for Oracle Database. However, whenever I read or hear “RDS”, the next word that…
Database Heartbeat 