Data Replication Solutions

Globally Distributed Autonomous Database offers data replication solutions to ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and additional scalability for reads.

Globally Distributed Autonomous Database offers shard-level replication with Oracle Data Guard with Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure releases 19c and 23ai. Raft replication is available with Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure beginning in release 23ai.

Oracle Globally Distributed Database automatically deploys the specified replication topology to the procured systems, and enables data replication.

Shard-level Replication with Oracle Data Guard

In Globally Distributed Autonomous Database a shard is a database. Oracle Data Guard replication of shards to physical standby databases can be used to provide individual shard-level high availability. Replication is automatically configured and deployed when the sharded database is created.

Oracle Data Guard is tightly integrated with Globally Distributed Autonomous Database to provide high availability and disaster recovery with strict data consistency and zero data loss. Oracle Data Guard replication maintains synchronized copies (standby databases) of shards (the primary databases) for high availability and data protection. Standbys can be deployed locally or remotely.

Chunk Set-level Replication with Raft Replication

Instead of replication at the whole shard level using additional databases for standbys, the Raft replication feature in Globally Distributed Autonomous Database creates sets of chunks of data from each shard and distributes them automatically among the shards to handle chunk assignment, chunk movement, workload distribution, and balancing upon scaling (addition or removal of shards), including planned or unplanned shard availability changes.

Raft replication is built into Globally Distributed Autonomous Database to provide a consensus-based, high-performance, low-overhead availability solution, with distributed replicas and fast failover with zero data loss, while automatically maintaining the replication factor if shards fail. With Raft replication management overhead does not increase with the number of shards. If you are used to NoSQL databases and do not expect to know anything about how replication works, Globally Distributed Autonomous Database native replication just works.

Unlike Data Guard replication, Raft replication does not need to be reconfigured when shards are added or removed, and replicas do not need to be actively managed.

For more details about how Raft replication works see Using Raft Replication in Oracle Globally Distributed Database.