In the thriving economy of cloud, database still remains as the strongest asset for enterprises worldwide. Though the cloud has revolutionized with bounding leaps of AI technologies, the database reality lives as the most modernized, innovative, and transformative asset for enterprises. Now, Oracle continues to maintain the database legacy, empowering organizations to operate at full-scale while aligning with the evolving modern IT infrastructure. Along with leveraging cloud capabilities, Oracle’s Exadata, Autonomous Databases, and Globally distributed database stand as the mark of authentic assets for extraordinary impact.
Oracle’s ground-breaking innovations around databases evolve the businesses into leading edge potential as their capabilities match the increasing computational speeds, market demands, user experiences, and unique business needs at higher speeds, delivering greatest performance of all time. Understanding all these databases and how they are aligned to your business is a crucial aspect to focus as this will decide your business fortune.
Previously, we have seen the power of Exadata and Autonomous databases and their resiliency towards industrial processes. This article deeply delves into unearthing Globally Distributed Database capabilities for all the business needs.
Oracle Globally Distributed Database
A Distributed Database separates segments of a dataset across multiple databases (shards) that reside in different computers across on-premises and cloud. It empowers globally distributed, linearly scalable, and multimodel databases with no specialized hardware or software. Oracle Globally Distributed Database performs each of these with its powerful traits – bold consistency, SQL powerfulness, extending support for structured and unstructured data, and Oracle Database environment. Ideally, it meets the data sovereignty requirements and supports applications that demand low-latency and high availability.
The partitioning of data for computation and storage helps in achieving Hyperscale computing – an ultimate purpose of this database.
Hyperscale computing refers to a computing architecture that scales up or down rapidly to meet increasing demands on the system. In real sense, this was innovated by internet giants to run distributed sites but widely adopted by large-scale cloud providers.
Enterprises tend to achieve hyperscale computing through a technology called – “sharding”. Here they distribute segments of a dataset across many databases on many computers. All the shards fusion as a single logical database – distributed database. It’s built on a shared-nothing architecture, meaning no shard will have either a software or a hardware. Database applications have the complete transparency for the data that’s been distributed and can be managed collectively.
Key Aspects of Oracle Globally Distributed Database
It’s a feature of Oracle Database – triggering data across a pool of Oracle databases that have no hardware or software. It offers best-in-class features and capabilities of RDBMS and NoSQL databases mentioned below:
- SQL language is applied for creation of objects, data consistency, ACID transaction properties, distributed transactions, relational data store, robust performance optimizer, backup and recovery, and patching with Oracle Database.
- Innovations and Enterprise-Grade Features, exclusively from Oracle.
- Distributed Database-aware Database Tools for database application development and management.
- Programmatic interfaces for supportive extensions for distributed database application development.
- High Availability with Oracle Data Guard and Oracle Active Data Guard that’s a built into Oracle Globally Distributed Database.
- Renaissance for multi-model data like relational text and JSON.
- Enhanced Scalability and Availability for NoSQL Databases.
Globally Distributed Database – Architecture & Components
The architecture paradigms of distributed database transcend traditional boundaries, redefining how we sort and manage data. An Oracle Database when not confined to a monolithic architecture, can be partitioned across a network of independent physical instances – shards – each hosting a subset of broader dataset. These shards offer unparalleled flexibility, empowering organizations to deploy data where it best serves the purpose.
Shards can have a cluster within a single region or span across the various locations while aligning with the strategies of a globalized enterprise. Another cornerstone of Resilience for Globally Distributed Database is Raft Replication that ensures high availability and disaster recovery.
- Shard Catalog: A shard catalog is the strategic hub of a distributed ecosystem. It automates shard deployment, centralizes management, and enables sophisticated multi-shard queries – functions that elevate it to a role of orchestration. It holds the definitive schema, preserves duplicated table data, and coordinates queries with precision, ensuring consistency across a sprawling network. Configuration changes—adding shards, refining global services, or executing DDLs—flow through it, streamlining governance. Materialized views replicate updates to duplicated tables across shards, while its query coordination capabilities handle complex, keyless operations with finesse. For high availability, multiple shard catalogs can stand ready, with Oracle Data Guard as the gold standard for failover. Even in a catalog outage, sharding key-based transactions hum along uninterrupted—a testament to a system built for resilience.
- Shard Directors: Shard directors optimize network route connections and leverage sharding keys to direct traffic with precision. Deployed as regional listeners, shard directors maintain a live topology map, measure inter-region latency, and balance loads dynamically. A forward-thinking deployment might place multiple shard directors—up to five per region—on lean, commodity hardware, ensuring scalability and redundancy.
- Sharding Advisor: The Sharding Advisor is engineered to guide architects and administrators towards an optimized sharded configuration that aligns with both current realities and future ambitions. By delving into the intricacies of your existing database schema and workload patterns, the Sharding Advisor delivers tailored recommendations that elevate efficiency, scalability, and performance to new heights.
The Sharding Advisor, dissects the structure and behavior of your database to propose topology configurations and schema designs that are anything but generic. It’s a forward-thinking approach that considers the unique demands of your data environment, ensuring the resulting sharded architecture is exemplary. The tool’s recommendations hinge on enhancing parallelism, reducing cross-shard dependencies, and streamlining data distribution.
- Global Services: Accessing data in this new world hinges on global services—database services reimagined for a distributed reality. They inherit the robustness of traditional Oracle services while adding layers of sophistication: role awareness, replication lag tolerance, and regional affinity. For transactional workloads, a single global service can tap into any primary shard; for read-heavy operations, a dedicated read-only service leverages highly available replicas. This is flexibility with purpose, aligning service design with business intent.
- Management Interfaces for Oracle Globally Distributed Databases: To helm a distributed database is to wield tools that match its ambition. The GDSCTL command-line utility offers a declarative, streamlined approach to configuration, deployment, and monitoring—a minimalist yet powerful interface for architects who value precision. Alternatively, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control provides a graphical lens, delivering insights into availability, performance, and lifecycle management.
Oracle Globally Distributed Database as Distributed Partitioning
In Oracle 23ai, as discussed it is hyperscale computing, this can be done by Sharded database with multiple shards which contain partitioned data of a table. Partitions in these shards are similar with the partitions of Oracle database that is not Sharded. This Sharded table can be created by “create sharded table”. By using this command, it automatically distributes the partitions across the Shards.
Benefits of Oracle Globally Distributed Database
Oracle Globally Distributed Database powers applications by imbibing the features such as – linear scalability, complete fault isolation, and global data distribution. Its advantages include:
- Linear Scalability – the shared-nothing architecture clears performance bottlenecks and offers unlimited scalability by supporting and scaling up to 1000 shards.
- High Availability and Fault Isolation – As shards never share resources associated with software, CPU, memory, or storage devices, there’s zero probability for operational failures. Moreover, the failure of one shard will not affect the other as they are distributed across various environments. These shards have high security standards that’s achieved through Oracle Data Guard and Oracle RAC.
- Geographical Distribution of Data – This enables the enterprises to deploy a global database over multiple geographies while meeting the data regulatory requirements.
As we foresee the future with database and their evolving needs that match the today’s competencies, INFOLOB ensures optimizing the sharding capabilities for hyperscale performance, data sovereignty, and high availability. Our approach with unparalleled expertise into Oracle technologies maximizes database parallelism for centralized management. By combining this technical prowess with a deep understanding of Oracle’s ecosystem—spanning on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments—INFOLOB ensures flawless execution, from schema analysis to deployment, enabling organizations to harness the full potential of a globally distributed, linearly scalable database that meets modern demands with precision and foresight.
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