Licensing

At the time of writing this book, Oracle bundled their Active Data Guard DR solution within the GoldenGate license, clearly expressing the close functionality of both products. As a Disaster Recovery solution, a Physical Standby database provides an exact copy of its Primary database, which is superlative. GoldenGate however, can easily replace a Logical Standby solution, offering more than just schema replication.

The Physical Standby element of Data Guard is quite different to GoldenGate's Changed Data Capture and Delivery. Although both solutions have a target database that is OPEN, the Standby database is READ ONLY and in "managed recovery mode". This means that data changes are applied at block level via Oracle's Database Recovery mechanism and not via SQL. The Primary and Physical Standby databases can also be automatically switched or failed over as both databases are mirrored copies sharing the same database name.