1 Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services

Become familiar with the capabilities of Oracle AI Database Global Data Services (GDS). Oracle GDS is a holistic automated workload management feature of Oracle AI Database.

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 require assurance that your mission-critical applications will remain available, even if a data center or region goes down. Extended downtimes can lead to major financial and reputational losses.

What GDS can do for you

GDS can automatically route requests to available databases when the primary system is unavailable. With GDS, you can minimize manual intervention, reduce Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and keep business operations seamless for your end users.

Disaster Recovery Across Regions

Your concern

Natural disasters, power outages, or geopolitical incidents can take entire data centers offline. When your enterprise has global footprints, it’s essential to have data and services replicated and accessible in other regions.

What GDS can do for you

GDS can provide automatic failover and redirection of users to healthy databases in a different geography, ensuring zero or near-zero data loss (RPO) and rapid restoration of service.

Global Workload Distribution and Performance Optimization

Your concern

With customers and employees spread 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 distributes workloads by routing users to the nearest or least-loaded database site. This ability reduces application response times, optimizes hardware utilization, and ensures that your users obtain consistently fast service globally.

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 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 is not merely a technical solution, but an enabler of business continuity, agility, and growth on a global scale. 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 delivering these specific technical features and business outcomes, Oracle Global Data Services helps your IT leaders and DBAs move beyond firefighting and foster deeper strategic partnerships with business teams and end users, supported by the assurance that world-class infrastructure provides.

Parent topic: Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services

Challenges in Managing Distributed, Replicated, and Globally Deployed Databases

Review some of the key operational and technical challenges of managing distributed, replicated, and globally deployed databases.

Modern enterprises increasingly rely on replicated and distributed database architectures to achieve high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. However, these benefits come with a set of inherent challenges, such as the following:

  • Complexity of Distributed and Replicated Databases:

    Managing multiple databases, including primary, standby, replicas, and caches, across diverse geographies introduces significant operational complexity.

    Ensuring that these databases remain synchronized, available, and responsive to application demands requires sophisticated coordination and management.

  • Lack of Unified Service Management:

    Traditional database systems require applications to be aware of the underlying database topology. This forces developers to embed failover, load balancing, and connection management logic into applications, increasing development overhead.

    The absence of centralized service provisioning and management creates silos and increases the risk of misconfigurations and inefficiencies.

  • Challenges in Achieving High Availability:

    Ensuring uninterrupted and continuous database availability during planned maintenance and unplanned outages, such as hardware failures, is difficult.

    Manual intervention is often required to handle failovers, switchovers, and disaster recovery, leading to risks and potential downtime and data loss.

  • Load Balancing and Performance Optimization:

    Distributed systems often suffer from uneven resource utilization. Some database nodes are overloaded while others remain underutilized, leading to performance bottlenecks.

    Applications may connect to suboptimal database instances, increasing latency and degrading user experience.

  • Global Scale and Compliance Requirements:

    Enterprises operating across multiple geographies need to comply with local data sovereignty regulations, which require specific data to remain within certain regions.

    Coordinating cross-region traffic while minimizing latency and ensuring compliance adds another layer of complexity.

  • Operational Inefficiencies and High Costs:

    Without automated mechanisms, enterprises face high operational costs due to the need for specialized personnel to manage and optimize distributed databases manually.

    The lack of intelligent workload management leads to resource wastage and underutilized infrastructure.

Parent topic: Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services

How Oracle GDS Addresses Globally Distributed Database Challenges

Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) centralizes and automates management, availability, and optimization of globally distributed databases across environments.

Oracle Global Data Services core capabilities and features provide a unified, intelligent solution to the challenges of data consolidation and workload management that help enabling enterprises to focus on their business goals rather than on operational overhead.

  • Centralized Service Management

    Oracle GDS provides centralized service management through GDSCTL (Global Data Services Control Utility). This utility gives you a single, unified interface for managing database services across replicated and distributed environments. Applications connect to a single Global Service Manager (GSM), which handles all underlying complexities, including failover, load balancing, and routing.

  • Automated High Availability

    With Oracle GDS, you can assure continuous availability by automating service placement and failover processes using dynamic workload routing and GDS load, availability and administrative policies. During planned or unplanned events, GDS transparently redirects connections to healthy and most optimal database instances. In particular, these redirects can be guided to the most lightly loaded or closest geographic instances, minimizing downtime and maintaining data availability.

  • Dynamic Workload Management

    The GDS framework monitors resource utilization (CPU, memory, network, and so on.) across all configured databases in a GDS pool (a group of replicated databases). Oracle GDS intelligently routes workloads to the most optimal database instance based on policies, node health, nature of workload, and performance metrics. This ensures even resource utilization, reduces latency, and enhances the user experience.

  • Global Scalability with Compliance

    Oracle GDS enables global deployment of database services, ensuring low-latency access for geographically dispersed users while complying with data sovereignty regulations through region-aware routing.

  • Simplified Operations

    Because Oracle GDS provices centralized control and policy-driven data services management, Oracle GDS intelligently abstracts the complexities of replicated and distributed systems. Automation of data services management reduces the need for manual intervention, which can significantly lower operational costs and reduce the risk of human error.

  • Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Compatibility

    Oracle GDS supports deployment across on-premises environments, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and third-party cloud providers such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure (Azure). This capability to deploy across environments makes GDS ideal for enterprises with hybrid or multi-cloud strategies.

Parent topic: Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services

Benefits of Oracle Global Data Services

Review the core business and technical benefits Oracle GDS delivers to Oracle database deployments worldwide.

Global Data Services (GDS) allows fault-tolerant database services to be deployed and centrally managed across a set of replicated databases. The GDS framework provides workload balancing across these databases.

Benefits of the GDS solution

GDS is an Oracle-integrated solution that renders the following benefits:

  • Higher availability and global scalability: Support seamless inter-database service failover among replicated databases in any data center, yielding higher application availability.

  • GDS provides application scalability on demand: Allows dynamic addition of databases. It enables replicated databases to be added to the GDS infrastructure dynamically and transparently to obtain additional resource capability to scale application workloads. GDS allows this with no change to the application configuration or client connectivity.

  • Better Performance and Elasticity: With integrated load balancing across multiple databases, GDS addresses inter-region resource fragmentation. Under-utilized resources in one region can be put to work on the workload of another region's over-utilized resources, achieving optimal resource utilization. GDS sends work requests to less powerful databases in a GDS pool containing replicated databases running on database servers of different processor generations and various resources (CPU, memory, I/O). When more powerful databases are overloaded, the goal should be to equalize the response time.

Extended benefits of Oracle GDS include

  • Faster processing for analytics: All shards are presented to an application as a single logical database, speeding query response time on extremely large data sets.
  • Future-proof scalability for increased data volume and transaction processing: Eliminate performance bottlenecks while enabling linearly scaled database performance.
  • RAFT Replication: Enables rapid failover within seconds and zero data loss during node or data center outages, facilitating an Active-Active-Active symmetric distributed database architecture that enhances availability, simplifies management, and optimizes resource utilization globally.
  • Meet data compliance and residency demands: Ensures that data stays in a given geographical location. Facilitates a single global database, with data distributed across multiple regions.
  • Deploy in the cloud or your data center: On Oracle Base Database Service, Globally Distributed Autonomous Database, or a multicloud architecture across Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

You can use Oracle GDS to achieve these benefits without the need to integrate with multiple-point solutions or homegrown products. GDS provides optimized hardware and software utilization, better performance, scalability, and availability for application workloads running on replicated databases.

Parent topic: Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services

Oracle GDS and Network Load Balancers Comparison

Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) offers advanced, database-aware management features not available with standard network load balancers.

Requirement Network Load Balancer Oracle GDS

Locality-based routing

Yes

Yes

Connect-time database load balancing

Yes

Yes

Publish routing and failover intelligence to clients

No

Yes

Replication lag-based database workload routing

No

Yes

Inter-database global service failover

No

Yes

Automatic role-based global services

No

Yes

Centralized management of database services across replicas

No

Yes

Native integration for Oracle Active Data Guard

No

Yes

Cost effectiveness

Additional expenditure required

Included with Oracle Active Data Guard or Oracle GoldenGate license

Parent topic: Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services

Capabilities of Global Data Services

Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) enables dynamic load balancing, intelligent routing, automated failover, centralized management, and role-based services to optimize database operations.

Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) technology provides the following principal capabilities:

  • Dynamic Load Balancing ensures optimal distribution of workload across available database instances.

    • Connect-time load balancing: Global service managers use the load statistics from all databases in the GDS pool, inter-region network latency, and the configured connect-time load balancing goal to route the incoming connections to the best database in a GDS pool. This prevents any single database from becoming a bottleneck.

    • Runtime load balancing: GDS enables runtime load balancing across replicated databases by publishing a real-time load balancing advisory for connection pool-based clients (for example, OCI, JDBC, ODP.NET, WebLogic, and so on.). The connection pool-based clients subscribe to this load-balancing advisory and route database requests in real time across already-established connections.

      With GDS's runtime connection load balancing feature, application client work requests are dynamically routed to the database that offers the best performance. Through a process called Gravitation, GDS dynamically adjusts connections between databases in response to changing load conditions, ensuring even workload distribution as demands fluctuate.

  • Intelligent Workload Routing routes incoming workload based on established criteria.

    • Region-based workload routing: Allows you to configure client connections to be routed among a set of replicated databases in a local region. This capability allows you to maximize application performance (avoiding the network latency overhead of accessing databases in remote areas).

    • Lag-based workload routing: "With Oracle Active Data Guard, standby databases can lag behind the primary database. A global service allows you to choose the acceptable lag tolerance for a given application. GDS routes requests to a standby database whose lag is below the limit. If the lag exceeds the lag limit, the service is relocated to another available standby database that lags below the threshold. New requests are routed to a standby database that satisfies the lag limit. The global service is shut down if there is no available database. When the lag is resolved or comes within the limit, GDS automatically brings up the service.

  • Inter-Database Service Failover provides uninterrupted availability.
    • In the event of a database failure, GDS automatically and transparently fails over services to a healthy replica. This automated and transparent response capability eliminates human error and delayed action.
    • Connection pools are instantly notified, ensuring minimal disruption for applications and end-users. This significantly reduces downtime and ensures business continuity.
  • Role-based Global Services provide tailored service placement based on business needs.
    • GDS enables you to configure services based on database roles, such as primary, physical standby, logical standby, and snapshot standby.
    • This allows you to enforce specific service placement policies and optimize resource utilization.
    • GDS supports RAFT Replication, Oracle Distributed Database and Oracle True Cache.
  • Centralized Service Management provided by GDS allows more straightforward configuration and management of the replicated databases' resources located anywhere with a single unified framework.
    • Create, configure, and manage services across multiple databases from a single interface using the GDSCTL command line utility or through the graphical interface provided by Oracle Enterprise Manager.
    • These GDS tools simplify administration, eliminate the need for manual interventions on individual databases, and accelerate service provisioning and adjustments.

Parent topic: Introduction to Oracle AI Database Global Data Services