Oracle Database@Azure is Gold Maximum Availability Architecture endorsed

April 9, 2024 | 5 minute read
Markus Michalewicz
Vice President of Product Management
Kalyan Kaki
Group Product Manager, Microsoft
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Oracle Database@Azure allows organizations to run Oracle databases natively in Microsoft Azure with high levels of performance, availability, security, and cost effectiveness. Customers expect high levels of data protection and resiliency from Oracle Database, and Oracle Database@Azure is no exception. New solutions and certifications for achieving disaster recovery and high availability on Oracle Database@Azure are now available. Options include the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Silver and Gold levels, the data replication service Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Zero Downtime Migration, and a new reference architecture to help you easily achieve Oracle and Microsoft best practices. Customers can also hone their skills with a new Oracle Database@Azure specialist training from Oracle University. 

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture

Oracle MAA provides a comprehensive and validated approach to designing, deploying, and managing highly available and resilient Oracle Database environments for your business-critical data. The Oracle MAA engineering team has validated the Silver and Gold MAA tiers for Exadata Database Service, running in Oracle Database@Azure.

The Silver MAA tier provides high availability through Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) with Exadata hardware and cloud software automation. The Gold MAA tier offers disaster recovery and data protection within the same Azure region with a primary and standby database setup using Oracle Active Data Guard and configured across different availability zones. Using either tier, your application availability benefits using Exadata Database Service colocated in Azure and Oracle MAA, minimizing or eliminating downtime for planned maintenance and unexpected outages. To learn more, see Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture for Oracle Database@Azure.

Oracle MAA Silver and Gold tiers

Unplanned outage

Silver: Recovery point and time objective (RPO and RTO) service level objective

Gold: RPO and RTO service level objective

Recoverable node or instance failure

Single digit seconds

Single digit seconds

Disasters: Corruptions and site failures

Hours to days

RPO since last backup or near zero with Recovery Appliance

Seconds to 2 minutes

RPO zero to seconds

Planned maintenance

 

 

Software and hardware updates

Zero

Zero

Major database upgrade

Minutes to 1 hour

Less than 30 seconds

 

To achieve zero downtime or lowest impact for online processing, apply MAA application checklist best practices. For long-running transactions, such as batch operations, we recommend deferring outside the planned maintenance window. 

Oracle Architecture Center 

The Learn about Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture for Oracle Database@Azure reference architecture shows how to deploy Oracle Database@Azure with the Azure Kubernetes service in the Gold MAA architecture. The solution uses Oracle Active Data Guard to replicate data from the primary database to the standby database. The solution achieves database backup and restore operations using the built-in Oracle Database automatic backup mechanism to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Object Storage. Read more about the reference architecture in the Architecture Center.

Oracle Zero Downtime Migration

Oracle Zero Downtime Migration is a free migration solution trusted by customers worldwide that simplifies and automates Oracle database migrations, including those requiring minimal downtime. Following Oracle MAA best practices, Zero Downtime Migration provides prevalidation and controllable automation for a single database or database fleet migrations to Oracle Database@Azure, Zero Downtime Migration now supports Oracle database migrations to Oracle Database@Azure with the physical online migration workflow, which utilizes Oracle Data Guard and direct data transfer. This automated migration workflow benefits customers using Oracle Database@Azure faster and without interruption. To learn more, see Oracle Zero Downtime Migration for Oracle Database@Azure Migrations.

Oracle GoldenGate and OCI GoldenGate

Oracle GoldenGate is a comprehensive platform for real-time data fabric, data mesh, and data replication capabilities with mission-critical data. OCI GoldenGate is the fully managed, cloud native service for all GoldenGate capabilities. Both Oracle GoldenGate and OCI GoldenGate are supported with a broad set of Azure data stores including Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Event Hub. Oracle has now also validated that Oracle GoldenGate and OCI GoldenGate fully support Oracle Database@Azure in all regions where the services are available today.

These new GoldenGate integrations empower mission-critical, real-time use cases for Oracle Database@Azure customers. For example, customers can replicate real-time data between Azure and OCI databases for distributed applications, data marts, or data warehousing. Customers can also use these GoldenGate capabilities to replicate data between Oracle Database@Azure and on-premises. Azure-focused customers can use these real-time integrations to replicate data from Oracle Database@Azure into other Azure native data services like Azure data lakes, event streams, or Synapse Analytics.  The GoldenGate product team has also validated the integration of OCI GoldenGate with Azure Active Directory as an identity provider for GoldenGate itself. With this new option, Azure customers can administer and maintain GoldenGate system users directly from the Azure native identity providers. To learn more about using GoldenGate with Oracle Database@Azure, see OCI GoldenGate with Entra ID for integration with Oracle Database@Azure

Oracle University

Earn the Oracle Database@Azure Specialist badge and add it to your professional profile. In this learning path, you dive deep into Oracle Database@Azure, get an overview of Exadata X9, and learn about Azure Identity and Networking services needed for Oracle Database@Azure. Become an Oracle Database@Azure Specialist today.

Conclusion

Oracle and Microsoft are committed to bringing the very best high availability and disaster recovery solutions, architectures, and training to Oracle Database@Azure. To learn more about the flexibility and options offered to protect your mission critical workloads, contact an Oracle representative or Microsoft representative, or check out our product page.

For more information, see the following resources:

 

 

 

Markus Michalewicz

Vice President of Product Management

Markus Michalewicz has been with Oracle for over 20 years in various positions. He is currently a Vice President with Oracle America and manages the Oracle Database High Availability (HA), Scalability, Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) and Cloud Migration product management (PM) team, which is part of Oracle Database development. Using database technologies such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Application Continuity (AC), and Oracle Data Guard, including the Active Data Guard option, his team has helped to ensure 24*7 availability of high-throughout OLTP and DWH database systems around the world and revolutionized the way Oracle’s customers get to experience the Oracle Database on-premises as well as when moving into the cloud using Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM). Applying real world experience and customer feedback, his team has also been instrumental in designing Oracle’s Database Cloud offerings, including Oracle Autonomous Database, following Oracle's industry-leading Maximum Availability Architecture best practices.

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Kalyan Kaki

Group Product Manager, Microsoft

19 year Microsoftee. Director of product management in Azure core leading a team of fantastic Product Managers and TPMs responsible for 0 to 1 products in partnership with Oracle, IBM, Epic, NetApp, and many more.


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