Using Global Data Services with Oracle Sharding

Oracle Sharding and Oracle Globally Distributed Database enables you to easily scale and manage globally distributed Oracle databases while meeting data locality and compliance requirements.

Oracle sharding enables distribution and replication of data across a pool of Oracle databases that share no hardware or software. The pool of databases is presented to the application as a single logical database. Applications elastically scale (data, transactions, and users) to any level, on any platform, simply by adding additional databases (shards) to the pool. Scaling up to 1000 shards is supported.

Oracle Sharding provides superior run-time performance and simpler life-cycle management compared to home-grown deployments that use a similar approach to scalability. It also provides the advantages of an enterprise DBMS, including relational schema, SQL, and other programmatic interfaces, support for complex data types, online schema changes, multi-core scalability, advanced security, compression, high-availability, ACID properties, consistent reads, developer agility with JSON, and much more.

Oracle Globally Distributed Database is built on the Oracle Database Global Data Services feature, so to plan your topology you must understand the Global Data Services architecture and management.

Oracle Globally Distributed Database enables you to deploy a global database, where a single logical database could be distributed over multiple geographies. This makes it possible to satisfy data privacy regulatory requirements (Data Sovereignty) as well as allows to store particular data close to its consumers (Data Proximity).

Data sovereignty generally refers to how data is governed by regulations specific to the region in which it originated. These types of regulations can specify where data is stored, how it is accessed, how it is processed, and the life-cycle of the data. With the exponential growth of data crossing borders and public cloud regions, more than 100 countries now have passed regulations concerning where data is stored and how it is transferred. Personally identifiable information (PII) in particular increasingly is subject to the laws and governance structures of the nation in which it is collected. Data transfers to other countries often are restricted or allowed based on whether that country offers similar levels of data protection, and whether that nation collaborates in forensic investigations.

Parent topic: Using Global Data Services (Architectures, Use Cases, Application Development)