Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate

Oracle Active Data Guard and Golden Gate are strategic capabilities within Oracle's software portfolio. While they generally fall into the category of replication technologies, each has a very different area of focus. Oracle Active Data Guard is Oracles strategic product for data protection / disaster recovery for the Oracle database. Oracle Active Data Guard, which is built on the infrastructure of Oracle Data Guard, allows a physical standby database to be open read-only while changes are applied to it from the primary database. This enables read-only applications to utilize the physical standby with minimal latency between the data on the standby database and that on the primary database, even while processing very high transaction volumes and batch processing at the primary database. An Oracle Active Data Guard standby database is also used for automatic repair of data corruptions detected by the primary database, transparent to the application. An Active Data Guard standby database can also off-load fast incremental backups from the primary database given that it is a block-for-block physical replica of the primary. Finally, Active Data Guard is a superset of standard Data Guard functionality included in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition thus it also inherits all Data Guard functionality - in particular:

Transparent operation across all data types, storage attributes, DML and DDL Management simplicity; simple one-way replication of the entire database Superior corruption protection Choice of asynchronous or synchronous (zero data loss) protection High availability during unplanned events via automatic database and client failover Minimizing planned downtime by implementing database upgrades, system and site maintenance, or technology refresh, in rolling fashion across primary and standby databases.

Oracle Active Data Guard requires a separate license and can only be used with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. It can be purchased as the Active Data Guard Option for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. It is also included with Oracle GoldenGate. Basic Data Guard functionality does not require a separate license, it is included with Oracle Enterprise Edition.

Oracle GoldenGate is Oracles strategic product for data distribution / data integration. Oracle GoldenGate is an asynchronous, log-based, real-time data replication product that moves high volumes of transactional data between heterogeneous databases with very low latency. A typical environment includes a capture, pump and delivery process. Each of these processes can run on most of the popular operating systems and databases including Oracle and non-Oracle. All or a portion of the data may be replicated, and the data within any of these processes may be manipulated for not only heterogeneous environments but also different database schemas. Oracle GoldenGate supports multi-master replication, hub and spoke deployment and data transformation, providing customers very flexible options to address the complete range of replication requirements. Oracle GoldenGate is also an excellent product for minimizing downtime during planned maintenance, including application and database upgrades, in addition to platform migrations.

Oracle GoldenGate is an Oracle product sold independent of the Oracle Database for Oracle and third-party database management systems. It is available for both Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and Oracle Database Standard Edition. The following are two examples of a systems architectures depicting the complementary use of Oracle Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate

In the above diagram, a Data Guard physical standby database is utilized for optimal data protection and to offload read-only workload from the primary database. Customer requirements also call for heterogeneous replication of various subsets of the production database to multiple target databases. Rather than host GoldenGate replication on the production database, the GoldenGate capture process is offloaded to the physical standby database where changes are captured from archive logs and replicated with zero overhead for GoldenGate processing on the production system.

The configuration in the above diagram can be used to minimize downtime and risk for any upgrades and migrations that are not supported by a Data Guard database rolling upgrade (e.g. migrating to a different hardware architecture and operating system, or application upgrades that modifies database objects). Data Guard physical standby is used for disaster protection to prevent downtime or data loss before, during, and after the migration. A second requirement addressed by this configuration is the ability to avoid any performance impact or operational risk by isolating the production database from any work required to effect the migration. These requirements are achieved by creating a parallel environment on the new platform. Depending upon the type of migration planned, instantiating the new primary database may be as simple as restoring a backup of the existing standby database. For more complex migrations it may be necessary to use other Oracle technologies to instantiate the new primary database, such as Oracle Transportable Technologies or Oracle Data Pump. Once instantiated, any additional changes are then implemented on what will become the new production system. When all changes have been implemented, a new physical standby database is created to provide continuos data protection after cutover. GoldenGate heterogeneous replication (previously configured), is then used to synchronize the new production system with all transactions that had occurred on the old system while the new environment was being implemented. When synchronization is complete, production is ready for cutover to the new environment. There is also the option of using GoldenGate heterogeneous replication after the cutover to keep the old environment synchronized with the new production system for a period of time - to provide a fast fall back option should any unanticipated problems arise.