Data Guard offers these benefits:

Disaster recovery, data protection, and high availability

Data Guard provides an efficient and comprehensive disaster recovery and high availability solution. Easy-to-manage switchover and failover capabilities allow role reversals between primary and standby databases, minimizing the downtime of the primary database for planned and unplanned outages.

Complete data protection

Data Guard can ensure no data loss, even in the face of unforeseen disasters. A standby database provides a safeguard against data corruption and user errors. Storage level physical corruptions on the primary database do not propagate to the standby database. Similarly, logical corruptions or user errors that cause the primary database to be permanently damaged can be resolved. Finally, the redo data is validated when it is applied to the standby database.

Efficient use of system resources

The standby database tables that are updated with redo data received from the primary database can be used for other tasks such as backups, reporting, summations, and queries, thereby reducing the primary database workload necessary to perform these tasks, saving valuable CPU and I/O cycles. With a logical standby database, users can perform normal data manipulation on tables in schemas that are not updated from the primary database. A logical standby database can remain open while the tables are updated from the primary database, and the tables are simultaneously available for read-only access. Finally, additional indexes and materialized views can be created on the maintained tables for better query performance and to suit specific business requirements.

Flexibility in data protection to balance availability against performance requirements

Oracle Data Guard offers maximum protection, maximum availability, and maximum performance modes to help enterprises balance data availability against system performance requirements.

Automatic gap detection and resolution

If connectivity is lost between the primary and one or more standby databases (for example, due to network problems), redo data being generated on the primary database cannot be sent to those standby databases. Once a connection is reestablished, the missing archived redo log files (referred to as a gap) are automatically detected by Data Guard, which then automatically transmits the missing archived redo log files to the standby databases. The standby databases are synchronized with the primary database, without manual intervention by the DBA.

Centralized and simple management

The Data Guard broker provides a graphical user interface and a command-line interface to automate management and operational tasks across multiple databases in a Data Guard configuration. The broker also monitors all of the systems within a single Data Guard configuration.

Integration with Oracle Database

Data Guard is a feature of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and does not require separate installation.

Automatic role transitions

When fast-start failover is enabled, the Data Guard broker automatically fails over to a synchronized standby site in the event of a disaster at the primary site, requiring no intervention by the DBA. In addition, applications are automatically notified of the role transition.