Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) has always been amongst the most highly available, managed cloud databases on the market. I’ve been looking forward to this announcement to further this message and meet our customer’s business-criticial needs – ADB now provides a Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantee of 99.995% uptime, with an Autonomous Data Guard (ADG) standby enabled. This means ADB guarantees less than about 2.19 minutes of downtime per month, and unlike other cloud provider services, ADB has, what we term, No Ridiculous Exclusions (NRX) with our SLAs. This downtime per the SLA covers not only unplanned downtime, such as hardware failures and network outages, but also any planned downtime during database maintenance tasks and patching. This higher SLA applies to both deployment types of Autonomous Database – Shared Infrastructure (my wheelhouse) as well as on Dedicated Infrastructure. Without an ADG standby enabled, your Autonomous Database instance will continue to be covered by the 99.95% availability SLA, as before.
Autonomous Data Guard, as you may be aware, is ADB’s best-in-class disaster recovery solution, which can be enabled by a user in just a few clicks on the database console. ADG protects your business’ databases against local or complete regional failures by providing a standby database that automatically refreshes data from its source / primary database. As described in my older announcement post about Autonoumous Data Guard, in the event of a major outage, a failover is automatically or manually triggered to switch roles from the primary database to the standby database, seamlessly bringing back up a running database in a matter of minutes, with little to no data loss.
The Autonomous Database team at Oracle has built years worth of automation and tooling to detect potential errors before they occur, as well as scalably diagnose, alert on and automatically fix errors and outages found while managing troves of databases. More recently, the team has spent a signifcant time optimizing and testing Autonomous Data Guard to not only lower and improve the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) provided by the service, but also support this higher SLA availability guarantee. Refer to the PaaS and IaaS cloud services pillar document provided on this OCI SLA page to learn more about this increased availability SLA, and our existing manageability SLA, that guarantees you will be able to manage, monitor, and modify your cloud resources.
With this signicant increase in the availability guarantee to 99.995%, as well as streamlining of the ADB service making it simpler and cheaper to use (such as the relaxing of BYOL (Bring Your Own License) licensing requirements, introducing the Oracle Rewards program to get free support, making the Oracle database service available on Azure and more) there has never been a better time to consider migrating all of your on-premise or cloud database workloads to Autonomous Database on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Try ADB yourself, if you haven’t already, with a simple LiveLab walkthrough and plan out your migration path to Autonomous Database today!
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