Getting Started with Oracle Global Data Services
Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) can help you to address your needs for high availability, disaster recovery, and centralized management for distributed enterprise databases.
Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) is an advanced Oracle Database feature that extends high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), workload balancing, and automatic workload routing across multiple Oracle databases, often distributed globally. With modern enterprises running mission-critical workloads across different regions and data centers, GDS helps your enterprise to ensure business continuity, performance, and regulatory compliance by orchestrating and optimizing database services worldwide. GDS works with native Oracle HA technologies such as Oracle RAC (Oracle Real Application Clusters), Oracle Data Guard, and Active Data Guard. Unlike basic failover or replication solutions, GDS provides a globally coordinated and intelligent fabric for database access-enabling seamless service wherever your data resides.
The following sections summarize common business requirements and explain how GDS addresses them.
Business Continuity and High Availability
Your concern
You need mission-critical applications to remain available even if a data center or region becomes unavailable. Extended downtime can cause financial and reputational damage.
What GDS can do for you
GDS can automatically route requests to available databases when the primary system is unavailable. This capability can reduce manual intervention, lower recovery time objectives (RTOs), and help maintain service availability for end users.
Disaster Recovery Across Regions
Your concern
Natural disasters, power outages, or geopolitical events can take entire data centers offline. Organizations with a global footprint need replicated data and services to remain accessible in other regions.
What GDS can do for you
GDS can provide automatic failover and redirect users to healthy databases in another geography. This capability helps reduce recovery time and support low-data-loss recovery objectives, depending on the underlying replication configuration.
Global Workload Distribution and Performance Optimization
Your concern
When customers and employees are distributed worldwide, latency to a single data center becomes a bottleneck. Different regions can also experience "follow-the-sun" business cycles.
What GDS can do for you
GDS can distribute workloads by routing client connections based on policies such as location and workload balancing. This capability can reduce response times, improve hardware utilization, and provide more consistent service across regions.
Simplified, Centralized Management of Distributed Databases
Your concern
Traditional DR and HA setups are often siloed and complex, requiring significant manual configuration and monitoring.
What GDS can do for you
GDS provides a single, unified control point to define, monitor, and administer all globally distributed databases and their services. A single control point helps you to reduce administrative overhead and risk of configuration drift.
Compliance, Data Residency, and Regulatory Mandates
Your concern
Global enterprises must increasingly comply with data residency and privacy laws (such as GDPR, CCPA, or APAC-specific policies). Data must sometimes stay within a nation or region.
What GDS can do for you
GDS enables granular control over which users and applications are sent to specific database locations, ensuring compliance by transparently honoring residency rules. In addition, the single unified control point GDS provides greatly simplifies your compliance requirements compared to managing databases using regional or national control points.
Maintenance, Upgrades, and Planned Downtime
Your concern
Your enterprise DBAs want to be able to patch, upgrade, or maintain database environments without disrupting business services.
What GDS can do for you
GDS provides mechanisms for rolling upgrades and planned downtime management by enabling you to drain connections from sites scheduled for maintenance and rerouting traffic as needed.
Enhanced Application Uptime and Customer Experience
Your concern
For Software as a Service (SaaS) providers and digital businesses, customer loyalty depends on your ability to provide uninterrupted service and speedy application response.
What GDS can do for you
GDS helps applications remain available and performant, even in the face of outages, load spikes, or IT maintenance operations, thus preserving your end-user confidence and satisfaction.
In the topics that follow, you will learn how to use Oracle Global Data Services to make your enterprise databases globally resilient, high performing, compliant, and easy to manage. GDS supports business continuity and operational agility for globally distributed database deployments. GDS simplifies your ability to keep your businesses running smoothly, delight users, and comply with a changing regulatory landscape, all while minimizing risk and complexity. By automating service placement, failover, and workload routing, GDS can reduce operational overhead for IT teams and DBAs.
Parent topic: Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services