Oracle today announced a comprehensive series of enhancements to Oracle AI Database. These enhancements help customers achieve extreme availability and security for all database applications, and always-on, stock-exchange level availability for their most critical workloads without requiring application changes or extensive in-house expertise.

“Oracle Database today powers over 90 percent of the world’s largest enterprises, and tens of thousands of smaller enterprises, all of which require ultra-high availability and throughput for their mission-critical workloads,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Oracle AI Database Technologies, Oracle. “Oracle AI Database 26ai on Exadata now delivers Platinum-tier availability with disaster failover times typically under 30 seconds, including for high-throughput multi-node clusters. This is up to 4X faster than Oracle Database 19c without requiring application changes or performance tradeoffs. For the most demanding applications, Oracle Distributed AI Database and Oracle GoldenGate can deliver Diamond-tier availability with disaster failover typically under three seconds. We have also introduced new security capabilities to help address emerging risks from quantum computing and AI-driven data breaches.”

Oracle Database’s Gold-tier availability is widely deployed today by the majority of the largest enterprises and governments around the world. It uses Oracle’s Real Application Clusters to transparently scale applications across multiple computers, and to protect from failures of individual computers. It also uses Oracle Active Data Guard to protect against disasters, site failures, and data failures. This Gold-tier availability achieves disaster failover times in seconds for single-computer applications and in low single-digit minutes for high-throughput multi-node clusters.

Customers with Gold-tier availability are upgraded to Platinum-tier availability with disaster failover times typically under 30 seconds, even for cross-region failovers of ultra-high throughput multi-node clusters. Platinum-tier availability requires no application changes and is available for any database workload in all leading clouds as well as on-premises. It is provided at no additional charge by just upgrading the Oracle Database and Exadata software.

Oracle is also introducing Diamond-tier availability for applications that are designed for extreme availability and run on the Exadata Platform. Diamond-tier availability uses logical replication of databases across data centers or regions to very rapidly detect failures and recover from them, even for high-throughput mission-critical workloads. Diamond-tier availability is implemented using active-active distributed clusters using Oracle GoldenGate or Oracle Globally Distributed AI Database. With Diamond-tier availability, even the most demanding applications such as real-time credit-card processing recover from disasters so quickly that humans don’t perceive any downtime.

Easily achieve mission-critical availability for any workload with Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Platinum-Tier

Oracle Platinum-tier availability is now available for customers running Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Oracle AI Database 26ai and Exadata, without the need for any application changes. All applications, from simple single-computer workloads to ultra-high throughput ones running on large Oracle RAC clusters of multiple computers, can transparently take advantage of MAA Platinum-tier capabilities. Upgrading to Oracle AI Database 26ai on Exadata enables customers to immediately benefit from much faster failovers and less downtime with no additional effort. Enhanced Oracle AI Database 26ai capabilities for the MAA Platinum-tier include:

• Oracle Data Guard Failover/Switchover: Helps customers achieve typical disaster failover times under 30 seconds for extremely large and complex deployments by delivering up to 4X faster failover. Data Guard also simplifies zero-downtime software updates and helps reduce costs by offloading read workloads to standby databases.
• Oracle Active Data Guard Remote Data Transfers: Delivers up to 2X faster remote data transfers for unencrypted data, and up to 9X faster remote data transfers for encrypted data compared to Oracle Database 19c. This enables ultra-high throughput databases to use encrypted data transfer with minimal performance impact.
• Oracle RAC Fast Restart Recovery: Helps reduce downtime created by node failures or planned maintenance operations. With Oracle AI Database 26ai RAC, online transaction processing (OLTP) applications can resume work up to 10X faster after a computer failure, and Pluggable Database startup is up to 2X faster.
• Oracle Transparent Application Continuity: Enables applications running against Oracle AI Database to continue running without interruptions or errors when a failure or upgrade occurs in a back-end database computer. Applications now benefit from transparency for more application use cases, queries failover 40 percent faster, and the CPU overhead is up to 50 percent lower in the database and 55 percent lower in the client.
• Oracle True Cache: Improves application response time by offloading reads from the primary database to consistent, in-memory, SQL caches. It also maintains read access to cached data during primary database outages, improving overall availability. Applications can achieve up to 10X faster query response and up to 2X faster read performance by using True Cache. Unlike other caching solutions, True Cache automatically stays synchronized with updates that occur on the back-end database, avoiding data inconsistency. This reduces development effort and overall costs.
• Oracle Zero Data Loss Autonomous Data Guard: Provides users of Autonomous AI Database Serverless with zero data loss protection for full database failovers. Available out-of-the-box at no additional charge on all leading clouds, this new zero-loss recovery capability lowers recovery point objectives (RPO) to zero for Autonomous Databases configured with Autonomous Data Guard.

Achieve near-zero downtime for applications designed for extreme availability with Oracle MAA Diamond-tier

Oracle Diamond-tier availability builds on the capabilities of Platinum-tier by enabling applications that are designed for extreme availability to achieve zero data loss and failover times that are typically under three seconds. Enhanced capabilities include:

• Oracle Diamond-tier Architecture: Enables customers to dramatically reduce downtime and its associated costs by using a combination of Oracle technologies in an integrated Diamond-tier architecture. The combination of Oracle AI Database 26ai, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle Active Data Guard, Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery services, and logical data replication provided by either Oracle GoldenGate or Oracle Globally Distributed AI Database provides unprecedented protection and availability from all types of threats.
• Oracle GoldenGate 26ai: Enables customers to achieve MAA Diamond-tier availability for ultra-critical applications by providing active-active data replication across geographically distributed regions, enabling zero data loss for full database failovers with recovery time that is typically between zero and three seconds. Built-in automatic conflict detection and resolution help ensure data remains consistent even when the data is simultaneously updated at multiple sites. GoldenGate is provided as a fully managed service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and other clouds, simplifying configuration and management.
• Oracle Globally Distributed AI Database: Delivers automatic, zero data loss failover both within and across regions, with failover times under three seconds by leveraging synchronous Raft replication. Upcoming support for asynchronous cross-region replication will further extend flexibility by enabling cross-region deployments without increasing transaction latency. The system can span multiple clouds and on-premises environments, enabling extreme active-active availability, even during cloud vendor outages, while also helping meet stringent data residency requirements.

Safeguard essential operations with breakthrough new data security capabilities

In addition to providing extreme availability, mission-critical workloads need to be highly secure. With Oracle AI Database 26ai’s new data security capabilities, customers can stay ahead of emerging threats and protect data across multicloud and on-premises environments. New security enhancements include:

• Oracle Deep Data Security: Helps customers reduce the risk of sensitive data exposure and address regulatory compliance as they deploy agentic AI. Oracle Deep Data Security in Oracle AI Database 26ai helps implement centralized, declarative, fine-grained authorization and data visibility policies directly in the database based on each end-user’s identity, roles, and context. By separating authorization and auditing from application code, customers can reduce risk for both new AI agents and existing applications, help secure agentic and RAG workflows, and apply consistent controls across relational, vector, and lakehouse sources without relocating data. Deep Data Security is designed to block AI agents that are acting on behalf of an end-user from seeing other end-users’ data, preventing data-leakage at the source of data, where security rules have a lower risk of being bypassed.
• Post-Quantum Cryptography: Helps customers strengthen their cryptographic posture now and reduce the risk of future compromise of encrypted sensitive information that is captured today. With advances in quantum computing, customers face the growing threat of “harvest now, decrypt later,” where attackers capture encrypted data or network messages today to decrypt them later when more advanced quantum computers become available. Oracle AI Database 26ai supports post-quantum readiness with NIST-approved quantum-resistant hybrid key exchange using TLS 1.3, AES-256 encryption for data protection, and quantum-safe public-key algorithms for authentication and digital signing.
• Database Security Central: Helps customers simplify and strengthen protection of their on-premises database estate by providing a centralized view of user risk, sensitive data exposure, and configuration posture across the full database estate. It enables teams to centrally detect configuration drift, assess privileged-user risk, streamline audit evidence collection, discover and analyze sensitive data access, and manage database firewall rules, all supported by an AI-powered security advisor. Database Security Central complements the existing Oracle Data Safe cloud service that protects multicloud environments.
• Zero Data Loss Recovery solutions: Provides unique database-aware ransomware resiliency with data protection engineered into the core database. These solutions deliver real-time protection of database transactions for near-zero data loss, restore and recovery that is up to 5X faster than other products, policy-based immutable backups, separation of duties, and granular access control. The newly released Virtual Air Gap capability further improves ransomware resilience, while the new ability to compress encrypted backups further improves efficiency.

“Oracle is already the trusted database for meeting the high availability workload demands of mission-critical applications in the largest enterprises in the world, along with thousands of smaller organizations,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst, Constellation Research. “With this latest set of announcements, Oracle is reaching a new pinnacle of availability with their Diamond-tier Maximum Availability Architecture, delivering near zero downtime with failover times typically under three seconds and zero data loss. This zero-zero availability level is demanded equally by traditional applications such as real-time credit-card processing and AI applications where agents need access to current data 24/7 to achieve their objectives. This clearly raises the bar for what a true mission-critical data architecture needs to resemble in the AI era.”

Oracle AI Database delivers extreme levels of availability with pushbutton ease, stock-exchange-level availability with MAA Diamond-tier, enhanced security and resilience, and scalable performance, helping enterprises large and small protect their most critical data assets to get the most out of them. Learn more about the latest advancements in this Oracle AI Database Mission-Critical Innovations technical blog.