Oracle Corporation announced a comprehensive series of enhancements to Oracle AI Database. These enhancements help customers achieve extreme availability and security for all database applications, and always-on, stock-exchange level availability for their most critical workloads without requiring application changes or extensive in-house expertise. Oracle AI Database 26ai on Exadata now delivers Platinum-tier availability with disaster failover times typically under 30 seconds, including for high-throughput multi-node clusters.
This is up to 4X faster than Oracle Database 19c without requiring application changes or performance tradeoffs. For the most demanding applications, Oracle Distributed AI Database and Oracle GoldenGate can deliver Diamond-tier availability with disaster failover typically under three seconds. New security capabilities have been introduced to help address emerging risks from quantum computing and AI-driven data breaches.
Oracle Database's Gold-tier availability is widely deployed today by the majority of the largest enterprises and governments around the world. It uses Oracle's Real Application Clusters to transparently scale applications across multiple computers, and to protect from failures of individual computers. It also uses Oracle Active Data Guard to protect against disasters, site failures, and data failures.
This Gold-tier availability achieves disaster failover times in seconds for single-computer applications and in low single-digit minutes for high-throughput multi-node clusters. Customers with Gold-tier availability are upgraded to Platinum-tier availability with disaster failover times typically under 30 seconds, even for cross-region failovers of ultra-high throughput multi-node clusters. Platinum-tier availability requires no application changes and is available for any database workload in all leading clouds as well as on-premises.
It is provided at no additional charge by just upgrading the Oracle Database and Exadata software. Oracle is also introducing Diamond-tier availability for applications that are designed for extreme availability and run on the Exadata Platform. Diamond-tier availability uses logical replication of databases across data centers or regions to very rapidly detect failures and recover from them, even for high-throughput mission-critical workloads.
Diamond-tier availability is implemented using active-active distributed clusters using Oracle GoldenGate or Oracle Globally Distributed AI Database. With Diamond-tier availability, even the most demanding applications such as real-time credit-card processing recover from disasters so quickly that humans don't perceive any downtime. Oracle Platinum-tier availability is now available for customers running Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Oracle AI Database 26ai and Exadata, without the need for any application changes.
All applications, from simple single-computer workloads to ultra-high throughput ones running on large Oracle RAC clusters of multiple computers, can transparently take advantage of MAA Platinum-tier capabilities. Upgrading to Oracle AI Database 26ai on Exadata enables customers to immediately benefit from much faster failovers and less downtime with no additional effort. Enhanced Oracle AI Database 26ai capabilities for the MAA Platinum-tier include: Oracle Data Guard Failover/Switchover: Helps customers achieve typical disaster failover times under 30 seconds for extremely large and complex deployments by delivering up to 4X faster failover.
Data Guard also simplifies zero-downtime software updates and helps reduce costs by offloading read workloads to standby databases. Oracle Active Data Guard Remote Data Transfers: Delivers up to 2X faster remote data transfers for unencrypted data, and up to 9X faster remote data transfers for encrypted data compared to Oracle Database 19c. This enables ultra-high throughput databases to use encrypted data transfer with minimal performance impact.
Oracle RAC Fast Restart Recovery: Helps reduce downtime created by node failures or planned maintenance operations. With Oracle AI Database 26ai RAC, online transaction processing (OLTP) applications can resume work up to 10X faster after a computer failure, and Pluggable Database startup is up to 2X faster. Oracle Transparent Application Continuity: Enables applications running against Oracle AI Database to continue running without interruptions or errors when a failure or upgrade occurs in a back-end database computer.
Applications now benefit from transparency for more application use cases, queries failover 40% faster, and the CPU overhead is up to 50% lower in the database and 55% lower in the client. Oracle True Cache: Improves application response time by offloading reads from the primary database to consistent, in-memory, SQL caches. It also maintains read access to cached data during primary database outages, improving overall availability.
Applications can achieve up to 10X faster query response and up to 2X faster read performance by using True Cache. Unlike other caching solutions, True Cache automatically stays synchronized with updates that occur on the back-end database, avoiding data inconsistency. This reduces development effort and overall costs.
