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High availability with Oracle Standard Edition
Simple Continuous Operation
If your task is to establish a high-availability (HA) environment in the Oracle universe, Oracle offers you its "Maximum Availability Architecture," consisting of RAC (Real Application Clusters), Data Guard, and GoldenGate. However, this package is made up of different solutions for various problems, which leads to questions regarding the need and suitability of the various products for your company. Keeping the definition of high availability in mind, you need to ask the following for your database environment: What should be protected?
High availability is thus divided into several considerations: Does an application need to be safeguarded against failure or – more likely in many cases – does protection need to be provided against potential loss of data? This takes you to the technical differences between RAC and Data Guard. Simply setting up RAC does not provide any protection against the data center failing, for example, because of a fire. This additionally requires a standby solution for which you can set up a Data Guard configuration.
Unfortunately, however, Data Guard can only be used in the Enterprise Edition. A nice note can be found in the Data Guard documentation: It may be possible to set up a standby database environment manually in the Standard Edition itself by moving archived redo logfiles onto the standby site via the command line and then importing them by script, but, of course, not with the monitoring and management capabilities that Data Guard offers.
Standard Edition and High Availability
Is high availability then possible only using the Enterprise Edition? A look at Oracle GoldenGate, which can also be used with the Standard Edition, shows several additional features compared with Data Guard. These include cross-platform and cross-version use and bidirectional replication. However, these features are not needed for the example here – a
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