Oracle Database In-Memory on Active Data Guard: Real-time Analytics on a Standby Database

Oracle Database In-Memory (DBIM) provides orders of magnitude speedup for analytic queries with its highly compressed, transactionally consistent, memory-optimized Column Store. Customers can use Oracle DBIM for making real-time decisions by analyzing vast amounts of data at blazingly fast speeds. Active Data Guard (ADG) is Oracle's comprehensive solution for high-availability and disaster recovery for the Oracle Database. Oracle ADG eliminates the high cost of idle redundancy by allowing reporting applications, ad-hoc queries and data extracts to be offloaded to the synchronized, physical Standby database replicated using Oracle ADG. In Oracle 12.2, we extended the DBIM advantage to Oracle ADG architecture. DBIM-on-ADG significantly boosts the performance of analytic, read-only workloads running on the physical Standby database, while the Primary database continues to process high-speed OLTP workloads. Customers can partition their data across the In-Memory Column Stores on the Primary and Standby databases based on access patterns, and reap the benefits of fault-tolerance as well as workload isolation without compromising on critical performance SLAs. In this paper, we explore and address the key challenges involved in building the DBIM-on-ADG infrastructure, including synchronized maintenance of the In-Memory Column Store on the Standby database, with high-speed OLTP activity continuously modifying data on the Primary database.