Why does modern business need Distributed Database?
Today’s businesses operate in diverse geographical markets, requiring infrastructure that delivers consistent performance and availability regardless of the user’s physical location. This global reach necessitates systems that are not only constantly operational and available, but also possess robust fault tolerance mechanisms capable of withstanding any unforeseen disruptions while meeting evolving data sovereignty and regulatory requirements. Global organizations are keenly aware of these demands and are increasingly looking towards distributed databases as a solution. These systems go beyond traditional scaling. They ensure resilience, reduce latency by locating the data closer to the user and offer architectural flexibility. Distributed Databases have become a strategic necessity rather than technical luxury.
Consider the high-profile database crash of one of the largest car manufacturers in 2023. The company had to shut down 28 assembly lines for 36 hours due to “computer issues”. As it turns out, it was insufficient disk space on their database, and, ironically, their backup database which they intended to failover to, ran on the same infrastructure. The company proactively resolved the issue and made a statement that it was not a cyberattack, but incidents like this underscore how infrastructure fragility can directly affect business continuity and competitive positioning.
In an era of always-on digital services, adopting and investing in distributed database technology is no longer a pipeline project but a necessity for sustained growth, customer trust, market leadership and regulatory compliance.
Why Oracle Globally Distributed Database?
Oracle Globally Distributed Database is a high-performance, enterprise-grade data platform that is designed to meet demands of Globally Distributed Databases. Built on Oracle Database mature Sharding technology, it leverages advanced optimization techniques and Exadata infrastructure to deliver industry-leading performance at scale, even across geographically dispersed regions.
Oracle Globally Distributed Database gives you the flexibility to run in the sharded architecture either as fully managed cloud service on OCI or self-managed databases deployed in the hybrid architectures of your choice where you can run one shard in OCI, one shard on-premise and one shard in any hyperscale cloud, giving you the ultimate flexibility while maintaining a unified logical database.
Oracle Globally Distributed Database runs Oracle Database, a converged data engine capable of handling any data type such as Relational, JSON, spatial, graph or vector thereby simplifying your distributed database architecture. A Unified data platform brings uniform security, monitoring and management to the distributed database system which improves your database governance, and the unified development model helps you build value-add applications faster.
In addition, with Oracle’s Bring Your Own Licenses model, you can take advantage of your existing Oracle Licenses which dramatically reduces your cost of operating a distributed database compared to any vendor service.
Introducing Oracle Globally Distributed Database on Exascale Infrastructure
Oracle has been at the forefront of technology innovation to provide High Availability and Disaster Recovery to mission-critical applications. With the introduction of Oracle Sharding in Database 12.2, enterprises gained the ability to deploy a sharded database across various geographic regions. Then in 2023, Oracle launched a fully managed Globally Distributed Autonomous Database cloud service which was designed to scale elastically as business needs evolved, deploy in geographically separate locations and ensure extreme resilience with Autonomous Data Guard and Raft Replication.
Building on that momentum, we expanded the portfolio by launching Oracle Globally Distributed Database on Exascale Infrastructure. It is a fully managed cloud service that runs on Oracle Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure giving our customers:
- Flexibility to choose the right size and shape of Exadata infrastructure.
- Ability to deploy the shards within a region for High Availability and across regions for Disaster Recovery and/or to meet the data sovereignty requirements
- Cloud elasticity by scaling up or scaling down the shards independently
- A single logical view of the database
Technology Under the Hood
Let’s take a step back to understand what goes into building a fully managed Globally Distributed Database Cloud service. The key components are Shard Catalog, Global Service Manager (GSM), and Database Shards. These are physically separate Oracle Database instances deployed on infrastructure of your choice. Oracle offers two deployment options to support the service:
Both support Oracle AI Database 26ai, a converged data engine that brings database native Raft Replication along with proven Oracle data replication technologies like Active Data Guard and Golden Gate. This gives our customers choice to decide how to architect their disaster recovery requirements.
When to choose Distributed ADB-D and Distributed ExaDB-XS
Since there are two powerful options, each designed meet different requirements, choosing the right solution comes down to your preference between automation and operational control.
- Choose Globally Distributed Autonomous Database if you want a “load and go” experience. This is fully managed service that runs on dedicated infrastructure in Oracle Cloud for teams that are looking for simplicity, automation and no administrative overhead. All aspects of the service, including the shard databases are fully managed.
- Choose Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure if you need greater control over operations, patching and configuration of your sharded databases. This runs on shared physical infrastructure where you have access to the VM and guest operating system and is ideal for teams looking for fine-grained control.
Both platforms give you Exadata performance and a fully managed Globally Distributed Database service providing flexibility to meet diverse scalability, reliability and regulatory requirements.
Summary
- Oracle expands its Globally Distributed Database Cloud portfolio by launching Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure.
- Enables our customers to right-size your distributed database infrastructure and benefit immensely from the Exadata hardware.
- Lowers your cost of operations by leveraging existing Oracle Licenses and generate additional rewards on a fully managed service.
- With Oracle AI Database 26ai, organizations can build AI-enabled, next-generation, highly resilient, always-on data platform that can handle any datatype unifying your information supply chain.
- Provide High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recover (DR) via multiple options:
- Database native raft replication
- Bit for bit replication with Active Data Guard
- Flexible deployment models let organizations choose between full automation or greater operational control.
You can get your hands dirty with Oracle LiveLabs for Globally Distributed Database service.