AI Database

Active Data Guard

Oracle Active Data Guard ensures high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for enterprise data. Survive disasters and data corruption while creating, maintaining, and managing one or more synchronized standby databases.

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Active Data Guard versus storage remote mirroring (PDF)

Fully integrated into the Oracle AI Database, Data Guard and Active Data Guard’s architectural advantages provide superior data protection and availability for the Oracle AI Database compared to the increased risks of storage replication techniques.

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Data Guard and Active Data Guard MAA best practices

Implement Oracle Data Guard best practices to achieve minimal downtime and zero data loss for unplanned outages.

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Application and AI Scalability with Oracle Active Data Guard

Oracle Active Data Guard offers many outstanding features that improve read-only workload performance and let applications process data on standby systems. It also supports AI use cases—for example, ONNX runtime enables inferencing on standby, with results automatically sent to the primary database.

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Why Active Data Guard?

Oracle Active Data Guard delivers enterprise-grade disaster recovery for the Oracle AI Database.
The following differentiators highlight how it stands apart and helps achieve business continuity.

The most reliable and secure data protection
- Oracle Active Data Guard maintains an identical copy of an Oracle Database by efficiently replicating its data in memory from a fully active primary database to secondary replica databases using Oracle’s unique redo information. Transferred data is continuously validated to prevent data corruption, lost writes, and ransomware attacks.
- Should a data block corruption be detected in any database participating in an Active Data Guard configuration, Oracle Active Data Guard transparently replaces the damaged blocks with a non-corrupted copy from one of the other databases online. Replicas can run read-only workloads and take over the application workload from an impacted database at any time while guaranteeing data consistency and accessibility, regardless of the type of failure, outage, or network partition.
- Learn more about Oracle Active Data Guard disaster recovery
Consistent read-mostly replicas with linear scalability
- Oracle Active Data Guard allows offloading read-mostly work to its replicas, freeing up valuable resources on the primary database to handle more read-write operations. Replicas provide linear scalability for intensive read workloads and occasional write workloads requiring transactional consistency with the primary database.
- Active Data Guard's ability to perform data modifications directly on the standby databases using DML Redirect (data manipulation language) allows applications traditionally required to connect to the primary database to work seamlessly when connected to a database replica.
- Learn more about real-time query and DML redirection
Continuous application availability during Oracle Database upgrades
- Oracle Active Data Guard facilitates seamless rolling database updates, including major-version upgrades, without application downtime. This ensures the continuous availability of critical databases during increasingly frequent software upgrades. Oracle Active Guard simplifies standard upgrade procedures by providing a unique automation framework that uses a replica database to protect the primary database throughout the upgrade process.
- This minimizes the risk of any issues or mistakes during the process and allows for an easy rollback of the upgrade if required. Starting with Oracle Database 23ai, the same process avoids application disconnects, enabling business continuity. This is made possible by Oracle’s unique ability for database sessions to transparently restart and restore the transaction state on the new database version, masking outages from users.
- Learn more about rolling upgrades

Active Data Guard features

Key Data Guard Capabilities

Oracle Data Guard keeps databases available with built-in features for high availability and disaster recovery. Here are the core features that help protect your data without the Active Data Guard license.

Disaster recovery to multiple standby databases: Oracle Data Guard manages one or more replicas of the database—providing zero or near-zero data loss in the case of unexpected outages of the primary database.
In-memory redo replication ensures isolation from underlying corruption through end-to-end validation of replicated data.
Fast-start failover (FSFO) automatically fails over to a standby database in case of primary database outage.
Snapshot Standby Database enables testing changes on the standby database, while providing continuous data protection.

Advanced Data Protection

Oracle Active Data Guard improves data protection by keeping businesses safe from disruption, data loss, or corruptions. These protections help organizations build trust and ensure continuous operations.

Automatic Block Repair provides automatic and user-transparent recovery of corrupted data blocks from the standby database. (🎥 overview) (🎥 demo)
With Far Sync you can achieve zero data loss across any distance in the event of site failure—with low network latency. (🎥 overview)
Block change tracking on the standby database significantly accelerates incremental backups by recording changed blocks, enabling RMAN to back up only new data and improving overall backup efficiency.

Higher Availability

Preventing downtime isn’t just about disaster recovery and data protection. The disruption felt by the business is determined by the application’s perceived availability, which includes not only unplanned outages but also planned maintenance events. Oracle Active Data Guard delivers higher availability by enabling continuous access to critical data

Application Continuity masks outages from end-users and applications by recovering in-flight database transactions following recoverable outages. (🎥 demo)
With Rolling Database Upgrades you can reduce or eliminate downtime for major version upgrades and other maintenance activities.

Meet Scalability Requirements

Oracle Active Data Guard offers advanced scale-out features to maximize resource utilization. By offloading read-mostly workloads, organizations enhance performance and increase return on investment while maintaining continuous operations.

Real-Time Query allows applications to query the standby databases using up-to-date data, freeing up primary database resources for critical transactions and providing a scalable shared-nothing architecture.
With DML redirection, applications perform data manipulation on the standby database without code changes or a separate connection to the primary database, simplifying the development.
Global Data Services provides intelligent load balancing and service management across multiple replicated databases, optimizing client connectivity.

Meet Scalability Requirements

Running AI inference directly in Oracle databases—especially offloaded to Active Data Guard—improves privacy, reduces costs, and streamlines operations by eliminating external dependencies. This approach ensures AI workloads run close to the data, maximizes underused standby resources, and helps maintain fast, secure, and efficient production systems.