Posted On: Oct 22, 2020

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports the creation of Oracle Data Guard physical standby DB instances which run in mount mode. It fully manages the configuration of Oracle Data Guard, and asynchronously replicates data over secured network connections between a primary DB instance and its physical standby mounted DB replicas. Amazon RDS for Oracle Data Guard mounted DB replicas require Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) but not Oracle Active Data Guard.  

The mounted DB replicas can be deployed in separate AWS Regions or in different Availability Zones of a given Region. The cross-Region mounted DB replica enables disaster recovery capability for mission critical databases by allowing a mounted DB replica in another Region to be "promoted" as a new standalone production DB instance.  

The mounted DB replicas feature is supported for Amazon RDS for Oracle customers who use the Bring Your Own License model with Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Amazon RDS for Oracle supports this feature for Oracle Enterprise Edition versions of 12.1 (starting from 12.1.0.2.v10) and higher. You can create mounted DB replicas in all commercial Regions where Amazon RDS for Oracle is available. Cross-region mounted DB replicas are not supported in the opt-in regions: ap-east-1, af-south-1, eu-south-1, and me-south-1. 

You can choose to convert a mounted DB replica to an Active Data Guard read replica to run read-only workload while supporting disaster recovery. Alternatively, if you don’t need to run read-only workload while supporting disaster recovery, you can convert a read replica to a mounted DB replica to conserve your Active Data Guard licenses.  

A mounted DB replica is billed as a standard DB instance and at the same rates. Data transfer between the primary DB instance and the mounted DB replica across Regions is billed based on the data transfer rates for the source and destination Regions. See Amazon RDS for Oracle Pricing for up-to-date pricing of instances, storage, data transfer and regional availability. 

Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database on AWS. To learn more about managed disaster recovery with Oracle Data Guard mounted DB replicas, please visit the Amazon RDS for Oracle documentation page.