Automatic failover for Autonomous Data Guard enabled Autonomous Databases on Dedicated Infrastructure and Exadata Cloud@Customer

At the end of 2020, we announced Autonomous Data Guard support for Autonomous Databases on Dedicated Infrastructure and Exadata Cloud@Customer, with industry-leading Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Today, we are excited to announce support for automatic failover with Autonomous Data Guard, enhancing RTO even further. 

Automatic Failover

Automatic failover, also known as Fast-start Failover in Oracle Data Guard, allows Autonomous Data Guard to automatically fail over to your standby Autonomous database in the event of an outage impacting the primary database. Automatic failover quickly and reliably fails over the standby Autonomous database to the primary database role, without requiring you to perform any manual steps.

Automatic failover is optional and can be enabled or disabled on your Autonomous Container Databases with Autonomous Data Guard. You can use both maximum performance and maximum availability protection modes with automatic failover. In maximum availability mode, automatic failover guarantees zero data loss. In maximum performance mode, automatic failover ensures no data is lost that is more than the amount of data (in seconds) specified by the FastStartFailoverLagLimit configuration property. FastStartFailoverLagLimit is set to 30 seconds and applies only to maximum performance mode. Automatic failover is only possible when the configured data loss guarantee can be upheld.

After an automatic failover occurs, Oracle automatically troubleshoots and repairs the failure conditions related to the primary database and reinstates it to the standby database role. After the failed primary is reinstated to the standby database, you can perform a switchover operation to change the database roles to the original state.

Summary

Automatic failover provides substantial gains in high availability and disaster recovery preparedness for your Autonomous Data Guard enabled Autonomous Databases without performing manual configurations or incurring additional costs. Learn more about Autonomous Data Guard and automatic failover here.