Autonomous Database (ADB) has revolutionized the way people think about and consume database capabilities for modern cloud applications. With ADB the database becomes a self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing service, consumed on a pay-per-use basis which allows you to focus on your business instead of managing technology. ADB can be deployed on dedicated Exadata infrastructure (ADB-D) which provides the entire technology stack (storage, network, compute) to a single tenant and adds operational customization, policy controls that can influence how the autonomous software layer performs its tasks while guaranteeing a 99.995% SLA.
We’ve been working very hard to bring you all the features that make ADB-D a perfect fit for mission critical workloads in modern application architectures that utilize multiple data types, workloads, and analytic functions in a single solution. We went off to a great start of 2022 with the announcement of Multiple VM Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer which allows customers to create multiple Autonomous Exadata VM Clusters and Exadata Database VM Clusters on a single Exadata Cloud@Customer infrastructure and then kept working on more features that you can check here.
This time we want to announce the GA for Cloning Autonomous Databases (ADB) across Exadata Infrastructures (EI) for Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure (ADB-D) and Exadata Cloud@Customer (ADB-C@C).
Cloning is the process of creating a point-in-time copy of your Autonomous Database or its backup set. You can use the cloning feature to quickly set up an Autonomous Database with historical data for quickly setting up test environments using production data, without risking data corruption.
But until now, cloning of Autonomous Databases (ADBs) was supported only between Autonomous Container Databases (ACD) in the same Exadata Infrastructure, limiting the ability to move data across your tenancy. With this new feature, you can now clone ADBs anywhere from source or backup within the same region or cross-region in the public cloud and within the same control-plane region in Cloud@Customer*.
*Note: cloning on ADB-D between public cloud and Cloud@Customer not yet supported.
With this new cloning capability customers gain multiple benefits such as:
- Moving production data to development / test instances in different EIs
- Moving data cross-region for disaster recovery, data sovereignty, latency reduction, etc
- Reducing production workloads by having queries / reports run on more isolated clones
OCI Console Experience
The cloning experience remains the same with minor changes such as the ability to select target ACDs on different EIs and a region selector in the public cloud.
For a more detailed walk-through see our step-by-step guide for cloning a Dedicated Autonomous Database.