Introducing Live Share: Real-time Data Sharing Between Autonomous Database Instances

April 2, 2024 | 4 minute read
Alexey Filanovskiy
Product Manager
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You want to share data and information across your internal teams to facilitate collaborations, increase the speed and quality of decision-making, and improve business outcomes. However, sharing data across database instances through data replications, even within the same organization, is painful. There are many things to consider—for example, how to replicate the data, how to keep the data fresh, and how to control who can see which piece of the replicated data. Before you know it, you spend months architecting the complex solution and hours every week getting the data in sync.

Does this sound familiar to you? Then there's great news! Oracle is introducing Live Share, a new feature with security-focused access controls to simplify real-time data sharing between Autonomous Database (ADB) instances without data duplication. The even better news is that it takes only a few simple steps to enable this capability.

How Live Share Works

The Live Share data sharing capability between Autonomous Database instances is a new capability that complements the Delta Sharing capability announced last year. Delta Sharing enables data sharing for those internal and external teams who do not use Autonomous Database or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). In contrast, Live Share enables optimized, native, and security-focused data sharing between Autonomous Database instances. With Live Share, you can share data across Autonomous Database instances in your OCI tenancy without duplicating data or introducing complex security configurations.

The steps are very simple:

1. Choose a dataset(s) you want to provide and wrap it into a "share".

Pick data assets you want to share

2. Choose a recipient—a single database or all databases in your compartment or tenancy.

Create Recipient

3. Publish the "share".

That's it—the whole process can take less than 5 minutes.

Why Is Live Share Important?

Many databases offer some form of data-sharing solutions but struggle with synchronization challenges and lack real-time data availability because they are primarily based on data duplication with associated physical data movement. Sharing data through data duplication is inherently not instantaneous and may not be very secure since the data needs to move out of its governed location. In contrast, Autonomous Database offers a native, security-focused, and real-time data-sharing mechanism between database instances, as described below.

Native: Live Share is based on Autonomous Database Cloud Link technology. It provides a cloud-based live share method to remotely access read-only data on an Autonomous Database instance and a smooth, low latency connection between multiple Autonomous Database instances.

Security-Focused: The Live Share data provider uses native OCI security to control who can access datasets by specifying a consumer of Autonomous Database, compartment, or tenancy. The data provider would register a table or view for remote access for a selected audience based on their business rules. The data is then made accessible to those with access granted at registration time. No further actions are required; whoever is supposed to see and access your data can discover and work with it.

Real-time: Since the Live Share technology provides remote read-only access to data, it does not move or duplicate the data. So, the data is instantly available across databases in real time. Teams can collaborate more efficiently, and analysts can make timely decisions based on the most up-to-date data.

Sharing data through the Live Share has obvious benefits compared to traditional data duplication approaches:

  • Frictionless team collaboration: You share data because you want to foster better team collaboration. When data is easily shareable and accessible, teams can work together more effectively, leading to better insights, decision-making, and business outcomes.
  • No more stale data—without data duplication efforts: Up-to-date data in real time is important because it affects the quality of the decisions you make. Data is always fresh when you use Live Share across Autonomous Database instances. This means business teams who rely on the shared data can use the data with confidence and make timely decisions.
  • Ease of data integration: Because the data is shared natively from one Autonomous Database instance to another, there's no extra step needed to integrate it. You can build new queries or applications with it just like all other data on the Autonomous Database instance or combine it with any external data accessed by the instance.

Conclusion

Autonomous Database provides a data-sharing solution that you may have previously thought was challenging and time-consuming to achieve. Live Share addresses the issue of data availability and synchronization between different Autonomous Database instances. Data is instantly available across databases, so users can access the latest data in real time, teams can collaborate more efficiently, and analysts can make timely decisions. With this addition, Autonomous Database now completes your data sharing needs—For Autonomous Database-to-Autonomous Database data sharing with the Live Share and for Autonomous Database-to-others with Delta Share.

Learn More

  • Live Lab — Implementing Data Sharing with PL/SQL
  • Live Lab — Implementing Data Sharing with Autonomous Database Data Studio
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  • Live Lab — Sharing Data Between Autonomous Database Instances Using PL/SQL
  • Quick Start guide
  • Full Data-sharing documentation
  • Introduction to Data Sharing video
  • Deep dive into Data Sharing video

Alexey Filanovskiy

Product Manager

My role involves overseeing the product management of Data Lake features for the Oracle Autonomous Database.

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