Magrabi Health boosts business continuity with Oracle GoldenGate

October 23, 2024 | 3 minute read
Mohannad Aljammal
Senior Solution Specialist
Peter Heller
Senior Director, Database and Data Integration Marketing
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Magrabi Health, a renowned eye, dental, and ENT provider operates across the Middle East, and in 20 locations and multiple data centers throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, upgraded their extensive IT operations with high availability and disaster recovery using Oracle GoldenGate in order to protect patient data and ensure continuous operations for their administrative applications.

Magrabi formalized their HA/DR operations using Oracle GoldenGate when they embarked on a hospital-wide upgrade from Oracle Database version 11g to Oracle Database version 19c.  Their goal was to create a long term, best-in-class, zero-downtime operational model and their test case would be business continuity during an extensive Oracle Database upgrade. Since multiple locations were failovers for others, the complexity of this project included support of 20 geographically distributed databases and their applications ensuring the entire network was coordinated and synchronized.

Business continuity is critical for hospital data and applications

Database disruption is a significant risk and would impact daily operational functions, such as patient management, medical records access, and overall service delivery.  High availability and disaster recovery would ensure uninterrupted hospital operations and safeguard critical healthcare data.  Magrabi justified their project with these goals:

  1. Maintain Critical Healthcare Systems: Central to hospital operations are Electronic Health Records (EHR), lab information, and hospital management applications. These systems must always remain functional regardless of planned or unplanned outages.
  2. Support Geographically Distributed Operations:  Availability and recovery operations must be in close enough proximity to meet SLAs and be available within country.
  3. Minimize Downtime:  IT administration for patching and upgrades is a necessity for up-to-date security and features.  However, these activities should not disrupt the hospital operations.
  4. Prevent Data Loss: Support a high standard for ensuring no loss of data during downtime or recovery operations.
  5. Prevent Data Theft:  Ensure no loss of sensitive healthcare data, which is critical for patient care and regulatory compliance.

Magrabi portfolio requiring high availability and disaster recovery

These mission critical applications continued to run during the multi-day database upgrade:

  1. Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems:  Manages patient data and medical histories, making their availability crucial to patient care.
  2. Patient Management Systems:  Handles appointments, scheduling, and admissions, ensuring smooth hospital operations.
  3. Financial and Billing Systems: Responsible for financial transactions.
  4. Inventory and Supply Chain Management: Ensures the availability of medical supplies, essential for day-to-day operations.

The solution:  Oracle GoldenGate

Oracle GoldenGate was the critical component for their comprehensive fault tolerant architecture. GoldenGate enables an active-active configuration that automates seamless switchovers between active and standby databases.

Magrabi uses Oracle GoldenGate to protect databases with multiple secondary locations.  When one location is disrupted, control automatically passes to a secondary database and the original site will become the new secondary location.  This bi-directional high availability architecture ensures continuous database operations which prevents disruptions across their many locations across the Kingdom.

“Our proactive approach to risk management includes the deployment of Oracle GoldenGate. This robust solution provides continuous data protection and enables rapid recovery in the event of unforeseen challenges.” 
- Ayman Anwar, CIO, Magrabi Health

Benefits realized: 

  1. Fault Tolerance and High Availability: With real-time data replication across locations, Oracle GoldenGate ensures that if one site experiences failure, hospital services continue uninterrupted by switching to a replica.
  2. Disaster Recovery and Data Protection: Oracle GoldenGate’s continuous data replication to secondary sites ensures that, in the event of a failure with the database layer, data loss is prevented, and operations can resume with minimal delay.
  3. Real-Time Data Synchronization for Distributed Locations: Oracle GoldenGate synchronizes data across all locations, ensuring consistency in patient data and operational workflows.
  4. Scalability and Future-Proofing: Oracle GoldenGate provides flexibility for future upgrades and expansions, ensuring Magrabi’s system remains scalable and adaptable to future technology changes.

Oracle GoldenGate provided a comprehensive solution to Magrabi's requirements for a highly distributed fault tolerant database infrastructure.  The collaboration between Magrabi's technical team and Oracle ensured that Magrabi continues to deliver high-quality healthcare without disruption, safeguard critical patient data, and meet regulatory standards. 

 

About Magrabi Health 

Magrabi Health Logo

Magrabi Health has become a symbol for excellence in the Eye, ENT and Dentistry care fields for its long heritage in Saudi Arabia, exceptional services, the latest technology, and ultra-modern facilities offering world-class healthcare.

Mohannad Aljammal

Senior Solution Specialist

Peter Heller

Senior Director, Database and Data Integration Marketing


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