New Amazon RDS for Oracle Capabilities and Multi-AZ Enhancements

Posted on: May 2, 2012

We are excited to announce new Amazon RDS for Oracle service capabilities and Multiple Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) deployment improvements.

New Multi-AZ deployment capability for Amazon RDS for Oracle

Multi-AZ is a deployment option that significantly enhances database availability by synchronously replicating updates made to a primary DB instance to a standby instance located in a separate Availability Zone (AZ) within the same AWS Region. Many Amazon RDS MySQL customers already use the Multi-AZ option to increase the reliability of their production deployments and we are excited to make this feature available to Amazon RDS for Oracle customers.

New Console and API Option to trigger a Failover in Multi-AZ deployments

Many customers have requested the ability to initiate a failover from their primary to their standby DB instance. The typical use cases for this feature include testing the resilience of a new application by forcing a failover. The results can help customers tune DNS caching and connection retry mechanisms. To support this and other use cases, Amazon RDS has added a new console and API option to give Multi-AZ customers the ability to trigger a failover from primary to standby when rebooting a DB instance. This option is available immediately for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for Oracle.

New Multiple Character Set Support Option for Amazon RDS for Oracle

Oracle provides the capability to set a character set preference that controls which languages you can represent in your database. Amazon RDS for Oracle now enables customers to specify their preferred character sets when creating new DB instances. Customers can now specify any of thirty character sets, including Shift-JIS, when creating new DB instances.

To learn more about Multi-AZ and Character Set Support for Amazon RDS for Oracle and the ability to failover on reboot for all Multi-AZ customers, please visit the Amazon RDS for Oracle Detail Page and the Amazon RDS FAQs and Documentation.