Oracle MAA Reference Architectures
December 2024
Copyright © 2005, 2024 Oracle and/or its affiliates
Oracle MAA Reference Architectures
December 2024
Copyright © 2005, 2024 Oracle and/or its affiliates
Copyright Ⓒ 2005, 2024 Oracle and/or its affiliates.
This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.
The information contained herein is subject to change without notice and is not warranted to be error-free. If you find any errors, please report them to us in writing.
If this is software or related documentation that is delivered to the U.S. Government or anyone licensing it on behalf of the U.S. Government, then the following notice is applicable:
U.S. GOVERNMENT END USERS: Oracle programs, including any operating system, integrated software, any programs installed on the hardware, and/or documentation, delivered to U.S. Government end users are "commercial computer software" pursuant to the applicable Federal Acquisition Regulation and agency-specific supplemental regulations. As such, use, duplication, disclosure, modification, and adaptation of the programs, including any operating system, integrated software, any programs installed on the hardware, and/or documentation, shall be subject to license terms and license restrictions applicable to the programs. No other rights are granted to the U.S. Government.
This software or hardware is developed for general use in a variety of information management applications. It is not developed or intended for use in any inherently dangerous applications, including applications that may create a risk of personal injury. If you use this software or hardware in dangerous applications, then you shall be responsible to take all appropriate fail-safe, backup, redundancy, and other measures to ensure its safe use. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates disclaim any liability for any damages caused by use of this software or hardware in dangerous applications.
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.
This software or hardware and documentation may provide access to or information about content, products, and services from third parties. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates are not responsible for and expressly disclaim all warranties of any kind with respect to third-party content, products, and services unless otherwise set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle. Oracle Corporation and its affiliates will not be responsible for any loss, costs, or damages incurred due to your access to or use of third-party content, products, or services, except as set forth in an applicable agreement between you and Oracle.
Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) provides architecture, configuration, and life cycle best practices for your Oracle database to meet your high availability service levels for Oracle databases residing in on-premises, Oracle Public Cloud, Cloud@Customer, or hybrid database architecture consisting of both on-premise and cloud databases.
Oracle MAA offers a choice of standard MAA reference architectures--Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum--for high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery. Each MAA reference architecture, or high availability tier, uses an optimal set of Oracle capabilities that, when deployed together, reliably achieve target service levels for unplanned outages and planned maintenance events.
Oracle MAA uses Chaos Engineering throughout its testing and development life cycles to ensure that end-to-end application and database availability is preserved, or at its optimal levels, for any fault or maintenance event. Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. Specifically, MAA introduces various faults and planned maintenance events to evaluate application and database impact throughout our development, stress, and testing cycles. With that experimentation, best practices, defects, and lessons learned are derived, and that knowledge is put back into practice to evolve and improve our MAA solutions.
For more information about the MAA reference architectures, click on the objects in the graphic above, or see Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture .
Not explicitly listed, every database needs to run on a reliable system platform. Oracle Exadata Database Machine is engineered to be the highest performing, most secure, and most available platform for running Oracle Databases.
Monitoring databases and systems is critical to proactively detect, prevent, and recover from issues before they have an availability impact. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is Oracle's MAA strategic monitoring platform.
Lastly, Oracle Cloud works collaboratively and continuously with MAA to incorporate all of the MAA reference architectures, configuration best practices, and life cycle operations. Oracle Cloud and MAA evolution go hand-in-hand, delivering a fully Oracle-managed MAA solution with all cloud database services, including Autonomous Database .
The Oracle MAA Bronze reference architecture provides basic database service at the lowest possible cost. A reduced level of high availability and data protection is accepted in exchange for reduced cost and implementation complexity. This architecture may be suitable for databases used for test, development, and less critical production applications and databases.
MAA Bronze uses the high availability capabilities included in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Bronze defaults to the Oracle Database single-instance or multitenant architecture. Oracle Restart or Oracle Clusterware high availability capabilities are used to restart a failed instance, database server, or any relevant managed service. For logical corruptions such as human error, you can use Flashback operations to "rewind" the database to a specific point in time. In the worst-case scenario of a complete site outage, there is additional time required to restore and recover the system and database from backups which may result in hours or days of downtime.
In MAA Bronze, a local backup within the same data center is always recommended for the fastest recovery. Oracle also recommends maintaining a second copy of backups in a remote data center to protect against site outages and disasters. You can use Oracle Cloud Database Backup Service to maintain a cloud-based backup of on-premises databases.
As shown in the table below, the MAA Bronze level of service illustrates the tradeoff between reduced implementation and maintenance costs, and expected downtime during planned and unplanned outages.
| Unplanned Outage | RTO/RPO Service Level Objectives1 |
|---|---|
| Recoverable node or instance failure | Minutes to hour |
| Disasters: corruptions and site failures | Hours to days RPO since last backup or near zero with Recovery Appliance |
| Planned Maintenance | |
| Software/hardware updates | Minutes to hour |
| Major database upgrade | Minutes to hour |
1RPO is zero unless explicitly specified
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures, click the graphic above, or click Next.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
Built on Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, the following are some of the required features to achieve an MAA Bronze level of service:
Optionally, you can enhance your high availability architecture by using these recommended features and capabilities:
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures, or to see the expected downtime for planned and unplanned outages, click on the objects in the graphic above
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The MAA Silver reference architecture is designed for databases that can't afford to wait for a cold restart or a restore from backup, should there be an unrecoverable database instance or server failure. This architecture may be suitable for production applications that are business critical and need to reduce downtime for local failures and most common planned maintenance activities.
The MAA Silver architecture is built on the foundation of the MAA Bronze architecture, and adds Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) active-active clustering for minimal or zero downtime in the event of database instance or server failure, as well as zero database downtime for most common planned maintenance events.
The most optimized Oracle RAC Platform with lowest application brownouts, integrated MAA configuration best practices and database and system optimizations for scaling, high availability and quality of service is Oracle's Exadata Database Machine, Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer (Exadata Cloud@Customer Gen 2) or Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure (Exadata Cloud Service Gen 2).
Just like in the MAA Bronze architecture, Recovery Manager (RMAN) provides database-optimized backups to restore availability should there be a complete cluster outage or disaster.
As shown in the table below, the MAA Silver level of service lets you dramatically decrease expected downtime for hardware failures, and brings most planned downtime due to software and hardware upgrades down to zero, when compared to the MAA Silver level of service.
| Unplanned Outage | RTO/RPO Service Level Objectives1 |
|---|---|
| Recoverable node or instance failure | Single digit seconds 2 |
| Disasters: corruptions and site failures | Hours to days RPO since last backup or near zero with Recovery Appliance |
| Planned Maintenance | |
| Software/hardware updates | Zero 2 |
| Major database upgrade | Minutes to hour |
1 RPO is zero unless explicitly specified
2 To achieve zero downtime or lowest impact for online processing, apply MAA application checklist best practices. For long running transactions such as batch operations, it's best to defer outside the planned maintenance window.
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures, click the graphic above, or click Next.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The active-active architecture of Oracle RAC (or Oracle RAC on Extended Clusters for on-premise only) provides a number of advantages for the MAA Silver reference architecture:
MAA Silver requires Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Oracle RAC, and Oracle Enterprise Manager life-cycle, management, diagnostic, and tuning packs for on-premises databases. Oracle RAC One-Node is an option for active-passive high availability if scalability is not required, and your environment can tolerate slightly higher recovery time for database and Oracle RAC instance failures.
Optionally, you can enhance your high availability architecture by using these recommended features and capabilities:
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures click on the objects in the graphic above.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The MAA Gold reference architecture is well suited for service level requirements that cannot tolerate long periods of downtime and data loss. This set of architecture patterns provides high availability and comprehensive data protection for all types of unplanned outages, including data corruptions, database failures, and site outages. Mission critical production applications that require quick recovery time and zero or minimal data loss for all database and system outages and planned maintenance activities will benefit from the capabilities included in the Gold reference architecture.
The Gold MAA reference architecture, building on the Silver reference architecture, provides you with four architecture patterns using Oracle Active Data Guard (or Oracle Data Guard). While Active Data Guard provides better RTO and protection overall, both Active Data Guard and Data Guard are viable for MAA Gold.
The architecture patterns vary from a single remote active standby with Fast Start Failover and HA Observer, to multiple standby database configurations including standby reader farms, and finally a far sync (across regions) zero data loss standby configuration.
As shown in the table below, the MAA Gold level of service reduces failover and switchover times from hours to seconds, and lets you do major database upgrades with minimal interruptions.
| Unplanned Outage | RTO/RPO Service Level Objectives1 |
|---|---|
| Recoverable node or instance failure | Single digit seconds2 |
| Disasters: corruptions and site failures | Seconds to 2 minutes RPO zero or seconds |
| Planned Maintenance | |
| Software/hardware updates | Zero2 |
| Major database upgrade | Less than 30 seconds |
1 RPO is zero unless explicitly specified
2 To achieve zero downtime or lowest impact for online processing, apply MAA application checklist best practices. For long running transactions such as batch operations, it's best to defer outside the planned maintenance window.
Click on the graphic above for details about each architecture pattern for MAA Gold.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The Gold MAA reference architecture Remote Standby pattern includes a remote synchronized copy of the production database (Standby Database) using Oracle Active Data Guard to eliminate single point of failure. The active standby database provides a high level of protection from unplanned outages and reduces downtime for planned maintenance activities, such as database upgrades. The most notable attribute is that the standby provides low RTO (recovery time) and RPO (data loss potential) in the case of a disaster such as a database, cluster, or site failure.
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architecture, or to see the expected downtime for planned and unplanned outages, click on the objects in the graphic above.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The MAA Gold Multiple Standby Databases pattern gives you the benefits of both local and remote standby databases.
Automatic failover to a local standby in the same region provides you with significant local disaster isolation and application failover simplicity. The local standby can be located in a separate fault domain or availability domain from the primary database. Application failover in this architecture pattern follows the recommendations described in Continuous Availability - Application Checklist for Continuous Service for MAA Solutions.
The business value of a local standby database is seen in zero data loss failover and application downtime reduced to seconds. By enabling synchronous redo transport, a zero data loss Data Guard configuration becomes more viable due to the lower latency between primary and standby database systems. Applications automatically and transparently fail over to the local standby, maintaining the same latency between application servers and the database, which is particularly important for OLTP applications and package applications, because higher latency can significantly impact throughput and overall application response time.
If a regional disaster occurs, making the primary and local standby systems inaccessible, the application and database can fail over to the remote standby. Even though database downtime is still very low when regional disaster occurs, the application downtime can be higher due to additional orchestration required for DNS, application, and database failover operations to the secondary region.
To make the secondary region symmetric, you can add another standby in that region. Another variation is to add additional standby databases for reporting.
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architecture, or to see the expected downtime for planned and unplanned outages, click on the objects in the graphic above.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The MAA Gold Standby Reader Farm pattern provides all of the benefits of the MAA Gold Multiple Standby Databases pattern, plus it allows read-only operations to scale across many standby databases for local and regional reader farm scalability.
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architecture, or to see the expected downtime for planned and unplanned outages, click on the objects in the graphic above.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The MAA Gold Cross-Region Far Sync Standby pattern gives you a zero data loss solution when network latency or distance between primary and standby are too great. When a transaction commits, the redo is acknowledged by a fault independent far sync server that validates and resubmits the changes to remote standby. If a primary database failure or possibly site failure occurs, the surviving far sync server sends the last committed changes to remote standby ensuring zero data loss.
Note that this configuration requires Oracle Active Data Guard for Far Sync, although other MAA Gold patterns have expanded to include Oracle Data Guard or Oracle Active Data Guard.
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architecture, or to see the expected downtime for planned and unplanned outages, click on the objects in the graphic above.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
MAA Gold, based on an Oracle Active Data Guard solution with a primary and standby database, provides a number of advantages for MAA Gold.
FastStartFailoverLagLimit configuration property. This property indicates the maximum amount of data loss that is permissible in order for an automatic failover to occur. All Data Guard Fast-Start Failover solution provides a quorum of 2 to ensure data consistency in this distributed Data Guard environment.Optionally, you can enhance your high availability architecture by using these recommended features and capabilities:
To achieve an MAA Gold level of service use Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle RAC.
Oracle Active Data Guard provides more Oracle database protection and advantages than third party replication, as shown in the following table.
| Benefits | Oracle Active Data Guard | Third Party Replication |
| Data corruption protection | Yes | No |
| Auto block repair of physical block corruptions | Yes | No |
| RTO | Seconds to 2 minutes | Up to 30 minutes |
| RPO | Zero or near zero | Zero (within region only) to near zero |
| Active standby reporting | Yes | None (additional copies required to create reporting database) |
| Network bandwidth required | Small (redo changes only) | Typical 7X bandwidth because all database, redo, temp, undo, and controlfile changes are replicated |
| Application integration | Yes (with Application Continuity) | None (needs to be customized) |
Automatic failover with quorum of 2 with Data Guard broker observers (preserves data consistency and prevents split brain primary databases) | Yes | None (needs to be customized) |
| Database rolling upgrade | Yes | No |
| Scalable reader farm while maintaining protection and disaster recovery | Yes | No |
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures click on the objects in the graphic above.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The MAA Platinum reference architecture has the potential to provide zero downtime for outages and planned maintenance activities that are not achievable with the Gold architecture. The Platinum architecture builds on the Gold architecture by adding Oracle GoldenGate replication to eliminate downtime for migrations, application upgrades, and database upgrades. Each Oracle GoldenGate database is protected by a standby database to enable zero or near data loss in case of database, cluster, or site failure.
Oracle GoldenGate provides the following benefits:
Unlike the other MAA architectures, application considerations are required to integrate Oracle GoldenGate into the architecture, especially if there's a need to switch over to other replicas. Global Data Services, or custom application service management may be required to achieve zero or minimum application downtime for activities such as migration, database upgrade, or site switch when one replica is down. Also, if multiple replicas are updated concurrently at any point, conflict detection and resolution must be configured.
To address zero downtime application upgrade, the best solution is to make application changes on an alternative primary database replica and then switch over from the primary database to the alternative primary database replica when all transactions are synchronized.
As shown in the table below, the MAA Platinum level of service addresses the most mission critical Oracle requirements, and delivers zero data loss and highest uptime potential.
| Unplanned Outage | RTO/RPO Service Level Objectives1 |
|---|---|
| Recoverable node or instance failure | Zero or single digit seconds2, 3 |
| Disasters: corruptions and site failures | Zero3 |
| Planned Maintenance | |
| Software/hardware updates | Zero2 |
| Major database upgrade | Zero3 |
1 RPO is zero unless explicitly specified
2 To achieve zero downtime or lowest impact for online processing, apply MAA application checklist best practices. For long running transactions such as batch operations, it's best to defer outside the planned maintenance window.
3 Application failover is custom or with Global Data Services
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures, click the graphic above, or click Next.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.
The MAA Platinum reference architecture requires the same services as MAA Gold, plus Oracle GoldenGate for on-premises deployments, or Oracle GoldenGate Cloud Service for cloud deployments. See MAA Platinum and Oracle GoldenGate Best Practices for more information.
For more information about Oracle capabilities used in this MAA reference architectures click on the objects in the graphic above.
Learn more about Oracle MAA blueprints for reduced planned and unplanned downtime for Oracle Database on-premises, on Exadata Database Machine, and on Oracle Cloud.