Oracle Data Guard

THE solution for Oracle data protection, data availability, and disaster recovery.

Oracle Data Guard provides the management, monitoring, and automation software to create and maintain one or more standby databases to protect Oracle data from failures, disasters, human error, and data corruptions while providing high availability for mission critical applications. Data Guard is included with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition.

Oracle Active Data Guard is an option for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. It provides advanced capabilities that are a superset of Data Guard functionality, including:

• Real-Time Query to offload read-only workloads to an up-to-date standby database. Read-mostly reporting applications that write to global temporary tables on the standby are also supported. This adds capacity, improves response time, and increases return on investment. It also provides continuous validation that a standby database is ready for production.
• Automatic Block Repair to transparently repair physical corruptions wherever they occur, at either the primary or standby, preventing any interruption in service or protection.
• Far Sync to enable zero data loss protection for every Data Guard configuration with minimal impact to primary database performance, even when primary and standby are hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Far Sync also enables off-host network compression to conserve WAN bandwidth.
• RMAN Block Change Tracking to offload fast incremental backups to an Active Data Guard Standby with 20x the performance of traditional incremental backups.
• Active Data Guard Rolling Upgrade to make it simple to reduce planned downtime and minimize the risk of introducing change to a production system by performing database upgrades and other maintenance in rolling fashion.
• Global Database Services to provide intelligent load balancing and automated service management across replicated databases. See Global Data Services for more information.
• Application Continuity to make outages transparent to users by reliably handling in-flight transactions. See Application Continuity for more information.

Additional details are available in the technical whitepaper Active Data Guard with Oracle Database 12c, and at the links below: