Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) is designed to address a critical set of challenges that enterprises face when managing distributed, replicated, and globally deployed databases. These challenges are tied to the growing complexity, scale, and performance demands of modern database environments that support mission-critical applications within data centers and across geographies.

Modern enterprises increasingly rely on replicated and distributed database architectures to achieve high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. However, these benefits come with a set of inherent challenges, including:

• Complexity of Distributed and Replicated Databases:

  Managing multiple databases, including primary, standby, replicas, and caches, across diverse geographies introduces significant operational complexity.

  Ensuring that these databases remain synchronized, available, and responsive to application demands requires sophisticated coordination and management.

• Lack of Unified Service Management:

  Traditional database systems require applications to be aware of the underlying database topology. This forces developers to embed failover, load balancing, and connection management logic into applications, increasing development overhead.

  The absence of centralized service provisioning and management creates silos and increases the risk of misconfigurations and inefficiencies.

• Challenges in Achieving High Availability:

  Ensuring uninterrupted and continuous database availability during planned maintenance and unplanned outages, such as hardware failures, is difficult.

  Manual intervention is often required to handle failovers, switchovers, and disaster recovery, leading to risks and potential downtime and data loss.

• Load Balancing and Performance Optimization:

  Distributed systems often suffer from uneven resource utilization. Some database nodes are overloaded while others remain underutilized, leading to performance bottlenecks.

  Applications may connect to suboptimal database instances, increasing latency and degrading user experience.

• Global Scale and Compliance Requirements:

  Enterprises operating across multiple geographies need to comply with local data sovereignty regulations, which require specific data to remain within certain regions.

  Coordinating cross-region traffic while minimizing latency and ensuring compliance adds another layer of complexity.

• Operational Inefficiencies and High Costs:

  Without automated mechanisms, enterprises face high operational costs due to the need for specialized personnel to manage and optimize distributed databases manually.

  The lack of intelligent workload management leads to resource wastage and underutilized infrastructure.

Oracle GDS is engineered to provide a unified, intelligent solution to the above challenges by introducing centralized service management, dynamic load balancing, and automated failover capabilities. It abstracts the complexity of managing replicated and distributed databases, enabling enterprises to focus on their business goals rather than operational overhead.

Oracle Global Data Services core capabilities and features:

• Centralized Service Management:

  Oracle GDS provides a single, unified interface for managing database services across replicated and distributed environments. Applications connect to a single Global Service Manager (GSM), which handles all underlying complexities, including failover, load balancing, and routing.

• Automated High Availability:

  Oracle GDS ensures continuous availability by automating service placement and failover processes. During planned or unplanned events, it transparently redirects connections to healthy and most optimal database instances, minimizing downtime and maintaining data availability.

• Dynamic Workload Management:

  Oracle GDS intelligently routes workloads to the most optimal database instance based on policies, node health, nature of workload, and performance metrics. This ensures even resource utilization, reduces latency, and enhances the user experience.

• Global Scalability with Compliance:

  Oracle GDS enables global deployment of database services, ensuring low-latency access for geographically dispersed users while complying with data sovereignty regulations through region-aware routing.

• Simplified Operations:

  Oracle GDS intelligently abstracting the complexities of replicated and distributed systems, Oracle GDS reduces the need for manual intervention. Its centralized control and policy-driven data services management significantly lower operational costs and reduce the risk of human error.

• Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Compatibility:

  Oracle GDS supports deployment across on-premises environments, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and third-party cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, making it ideal for enterprises with hybrid or multi-cloud strategies.

Global Data Services (GDS) allows fault-tolerant database services to be deployed and centrally managed across a set of replicated databases. The GDS framework provides workload balancing across these databases. More specifically, GDS is an Oracle-integrated solution that renders the following benefits:

• Higher availability and global scalability: Support seamless inter-database service failover among replicated databases in any data center, yielding higher application availability.

• GDS provides application scalability on demand: Allows dynamic addition of databases. It enables replicated databases to be added to the GDS infrastructure dynamically and transparently to obtain additional resource capability to scale application workloads. GDS allows this with no change to the application configuration or client connectivity.

• Better Performance and Elasticity: With integrated load balancing across multiple databases, GDS addresses inter-region resource fragmentation. Under-utilized resources in one region can be put to work on the workload of another region's over-utilized resources, achieving optimal resource utilization. GDS sends work requests to less powerful databases in a GDS pool containing replicated databases running on database servers of different processor generations and various resources (CPU, memory, I/O). When more powerful databases are overloaded, the goal should be to equalize the response time.

You can use Oracle GDS to achieve these benefits without the need to integrate with multiple-point solutions or homegrown products. GDS provides optimized hardware and software utilization, better performance, scalability, and availability for application workloads running on replicated databases.

Oracle Global Data Services (GDS) technology provides the following principal capabilities:

• Dynamic Load Balancing ensures optimal distribution of workload across available database instances.

  • Connect-time load balancing: Global service managers use the load statistics from all databases in the GDS pool, inter-region network latency, and the configured connect-time load balancing goal to route the incoming connections to the best database in a GDS pool. This prevents any single database from becoming a bottleneck.

  • Runtime load balancing: GDS enables runtime load balancing across replicated databases by publishing a real-time load balancing advisory for connection pool-based clients (for example, OCI, JDBC, ODP.NET, WebLogic, and so on.). The connection pool-based clients subscribe to this load-balancing advisory and route database requests in real time across already-established connections.

    With GDS's runtime connection load balancing feature, application client work requests are dynamically routed to the database that offers the best performance. Through a process called Gravitation, GDS dynamically adjusts connections between databases in response to changing load conditions, ensuring even workload distribution as demands fluctuate.

• Intelligent Workload Routing routes incoming workload based on established criteria.

  • Region-based workload routing: Allows you to configure client connections to be routed among a set of replicated databases in a local region. This capability allows you to maximize application performance (avoiding the network latency overhead of accessing databases in remote areas).

  • Lag-based workload routing: With Oracle Active Data Guard, standbys may lag behind the primary database. A global service allows you to choose the acceptable lag tolerance for a given application. GDS routes requests to a standby database whose lag is below the limit. If the lag exceeds the lag limit, the service is relocated to another available standby database that lags below the threshold. New requests are routed to a standby database that satisfies the lag limit. The global service is shut down if there is no available database. When the lag is resolved or comes within the limit, GDS automatically brings up the service.

• Inter-Database Service Failover provides uninterupted availability.
  • In the event of a database failure, GDS automatically and transparently fails over services to a healthy replica. This automated and transparent response capability eliminates human error and delayed action.
  • Connection pools are instantly notified, ensuring minimal disruption for applications and end-users. This significantly reduces downtime and ensures business continuity.
• Role-based Global Services provide tailored service placement based on business needs.
  • GDS enables you to configure services based on database roles, such as primary, physical standby, logical standby, and snapshot standby.
  • This allows you to enforce specific service placement policies and optimize resource utilization.
  • GDS supports RAFT Replication, Oracle Distributed Database and Oracle True Cache.
• Centralized Service Management provided by GDS allows more straightforward configuration and management of the replicated databases' resources located anywhere with a single unified framework.
  • Create, configure, and manage services across multiple databases from a single interface using the GDSCTL command line utility or through the graphical interface provided by Oracle Enterprise Manager.
  • These GDS tools simplify administration, eliminate the need for manual interventions on individual databases, and accelerate service provisioning and adjustments.