Oracle Data Guard Reviews

Oracle Data Guard is a critical part of our business applications. The solution helps protect our data from accidental or unauthorized changes.

The solution can be deployed on-prem and on the cloud.

The solution has helped improve our organization by making the data more accessible quicker.

The most valuable feature is the flashback standby, which allows us to test without scrapping the database.

I would like the ability to use the read-only format from other sites for more reporting not only for disasters but also to offload the workloads on our production site. This will require some investment.

I have been using the solution for 15 years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

I previously used Dell EMC RecoverPoint. Oracle Data Guard is more native to the database, so it will have better features, better flexibility, and be easy to operate or activate in terms of disaster. The solution has also reduced the traffic of the network. EMC RecoverPoint used too much data to be transferred, but with Oracle Data Guard less data will be transferred.

The initial setup is complex. I give the setup a two out of ten.

We tested internally and then configured the Oracle Data Guard according to the procedures we found from the published Oracle site. We then deployed the solution. The deployment takes around four months and requires three people.

We use the experts who are there for the provisioning of the Cloud infrastructure, but most of the implementation is completed by our technical team.

We have seen a return on investment because the solution is available almost instantly, making it a worthwhile investment.

There is no set cost for the solution. The cost of the Oracle license will depend on the negotiations with Oracle. The license is costly compared with other database systems.

The license includes primary support, patches, and technical support.

We evaluated CloudEndure but it did not meet our requirements.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

The maintenance is completed in-house but is rarely required. We monitor the solution with the help of our operation team.

Oracle Data Guard can allow us to enhance our system by making each of our databases, primary and standby, usable at the same time. 

We moved from on-premises to a private cloud.

Only our ERP admins use this solution, so it's about five people.

The most important feature is that if I want to test the database at the disaster recovery site, I can take a snapshot, test it, and then revert it back to the original state without needing to restore the complete database from the primary data center to the disaster recovery.

They may need to include the monitoring and the alerting part in Data Guard. In case there is a delay in the sync from the primary to the DR site, it is going against more than the expected RTO or the RPO, we should be able to get an alert or see it in the dashboard.

I've been using this solution for three years.

The stability is good. It's very reliable.

The scalability is good. If we want to add more databases, we are able to do it without any issues.

The initial solution we used was a basic solution that involved manually copying the logs from the primary to the secondary site, and there was no automation.

Initial setup is of medium difficulty if you know how to use Oracle Data Guard. Implementation took three days.

Implementation was done in-house. We only had a maximum of three people deploying the solution. 

The cost is expensive.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

We use it for application disaster recovery. It is deployed on-prem, and one side is our side, and the second side is Microsoft Azure.

Backup and application continuity are most valuable.

The usage of block storage devices in the cloud or migration of a type of storage from one site to another site can be improved. Currently, we have to use multi-node to single node because of the lack of storage support on the Azure side. It did not really work. Our DBA had to spend a lot of time tweaking the Data Guard tools, or the underlying Oracle VMs, to make sure that Data Guard would run on top of different types of storage. So, if it can support transporting or getting from one type of storage to another type of storage in a different site or a different technology, it would be very helpful.

Its support should also be improved.

I have been working with this solution for the last two years.

If one is most stable, I'd rate it a two out of five. We were facing some issues. It isn't something that you set up and then go to sleep for two years. We have to maintain it and tweak it several times, but it is still very good in terms of stability.

It is very scalable and reliable. 

I would rate it a two out of five. It is not very good. There are a lot of community guides, but Oracle documentation is not straightforward, specifically when you use one site as the cloud site and one site as your on-prem site. If one is the best, in the cloud arena, I would rate them a two out of five. There is some community support, and there is some Oracle support, but they still have room to improve.

It was complex. My DBA had a difficult time. If five represents the most complex, I would rate it a five out of five in terms of complexity. 

It required multiple experts. It required Microsoft support, our own system experts, and an external DBA to make the transition work. It took us two weeks to move from one Data Guard replication to another Data Guard replication.

It is not a cheap product, but if you look at the price, features, availability, scalability, and maturity, it is a very good product. 

Involve Oracle as early as you can and do a version upgrade to the latest DB version before you try to migrate to the cloud. First, do all the migrations that you need to do locally in your Oracle database, and only after that, do a cloud migration.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is quite reliable, but there are problems. It is not perfect. There is a monopoly of technology, and this is the only cost-sensitive product around. The other products are either very expensive or not reliable.

We primarily use the solution to have the peer site and a copy of it available in our global data center.

The installation process is straightforward. 

The solution is stable and the performance is good. 

The solution can scale as needed. 

Recently we had a P1 case that we needed to raise. There were so many other problems that cropped out of it when we were trying to execute a fix. 

Overall, there are some operational issues that need to be dealt with. 

The solution should be more secure from a protection perspective. 

There may be some bugs in the solution right now. 

We've used the solution for eight to ten instances. It's been a few years. 

The performance and stability are great. It doesn't crash or freeze. I find it to be a reliable product. 

I would say that the solution is scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

We have about 3,000 users on the solution right now.

The initial setup is not overly difficult. It's not complex. It's very easy, very straightforward. 

I cannot recall the exact amount of time the actual deployment took. 

We have some engineers that can handle the setup process. We have eight or nine that can handle deployment or maintenance tasks. 

We pay a yearly licensing fee to Oracle. 

I also looked at MySQL as a potential option before choosing this solution. 

I'd rate the solution at a five out of ten. We've recently had some issues and aren't very satisfied with it right now. 

At this point, I would not recommend it to others. It might be too buggy for most people. 

My primary use case is to cache our monthly data and ensure that same data is copied for DR (disaster recovery) side. This solution is deployed on-premises. 

One of the most valuable features is real-time replication. The version we're using is reliable and easy to deploy.

Oracle could be improved by the ability to manage it on the cloud. This on-premises version is secure and reliable, but I'm sure that they will soon provide a cloud solution that will be even better. In one to two years, we will probably move to the cloud—we have already moved to the cloud with Microsoft Exchange, but our databases are still on-premises. I would prefer managing a cloud version of Oracle.

I have been using Data Guard for about five years. 

This is a stable solution. We have one person who is responsible for maintaining and working on the database. 

In our organization, we have over thirty to forty people using Oracle ERP solutions. 

We have Oracle's Extended Support. Whenever an issue arises, we log in to the portal and our queries are resolved with the help of Oracle's technical support. The support could be better, but we are still using the support offering of our old version of Oracle and the legal portion normally suggests an early upgrade to the newer release. 

The installation is straightforward. It's not complex at all, and our IT guy managed it easily. 

We implemented through an in-house team. 

We work for a non-profit organization, so we have a discounted rate on licensing and other purchasing agreements. 

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. We are currently running version 11g, but we are planning on upgrading to 12c. I always recommend Oracle Data Guard for anyone considering implementing it in their organization. 

We have a primary database and a secondary database. Both databases are on different sites, which are geographically distant. One site is used as the primary site, and the other one is used as the secondary site. We have configured Oracle Data Guard to instantly replicate the data from one database to the other database on a different site. That's what we do with the Oracle Data Guard at this point. It's about business continuity.

We have found the replication feature the most useful. We use this feature the most. 

The ability to recover a database with less effort and the use of Oracle Data Guard Broker to administer the complete environment are also very useful features.

One thing that can be improved is the GUI. It would be good to have a very nice GUI to easily configure and administer, providing different presentations to the database administrator. 

The feature that can be included is the integration with third-party monitoring systems, that is, monitoring systems from other vendors, not only from Oracle.

We have been using Oracle Data Guard since 2010. Currently, we are using the latest version. 

We didn't have any incidents that caused any major problems with this implementation. There aren't any concerns regarding the stability of this solution. 

Once implemented, we can administer the whole environment with no downtime. We can switch over between sites and keep on using Oracle Data Guard like this. Until now, there aren't many things to do. It has been very good. That's why we keep on using this solution.

It was a good experience when we had to replicate it to more than one database and use it for new database creations and all such things. It was very simple, and until now, there are not many problems or gaps in the usability of this solution. It works very well.

We didn't have many problems and much experience with technical support. 

Once implemented, we only have to monitor and take care of the gaps in the solution. Most of them happen because of the connectivity, either bandwidth or something else, or because of the growth of the database or the data being migrated from one database to another.

The initial setup was quite complex, but it was because of a different implementation approach. It's not so complex as such. 

When it was the manual version 9, we migrated it to version 11, and now we migrated again to version 19, which is a different approach for implementing it. In the beginning, it was new and quite complex, but not so much to be done later.

It's mandatory in order to be ready for any incident when someone has a similar environment. 

When we talk about Oracle, we are talking about the venue database, translation of database, online translation of database, and atomic translations. When we need to guarantee the stability of the database, we have to be careful. 

In financial enterprises that use Oracle as a secure relational database management system, the data that you have is very important, and it is the asset that brings the most value to the company. I would recommend that every implementation that goes to the production environment must be done together with Oracle Data Guard. Even small databases can be powered by this solution. 

I would rate Oracle Data Guard a nine out of ten. During all these times and all these years, if I can count the number of times that we had to intervene or we had to do something by ourselves, I can't count more than three times.

We have a couple of Oracle systems that are attached to different types of applications.
In terms of Data Guard, we use it for factory monitoring.

We like Oracle because the solution is very robust. It's also efficient for queries and is easy to scale.

The database administration needs improvement. With Oracle, we have a lot of features for administrating data, but it might be too many. It needs to be simplified. It should be automated. Looking at Enterprise Manager, there are too many KPIs in place. Directly on-site, we do not need to choose all of them. Administration, generally speaking, needs to be improved.

Oracle should also continue to simplify the upgrade using Data Guard. We have already seen reduced outage timing any time we are doing upgrade, so maybe they are heading in that direction, but it can always be improved.

The stability of the solution is good.

The scalability of the solution is good. We have roughly 1,000 users right now.

Technical support is very good. If at any time we write a ticket, we get the appropriate answer on time. 

The set is straightforward but it is dependent on the audience you have. Internally, we have experienced DBAs, so deploying Oracle is straightforward. If we had to do the same job for an external company it could be complex. 

Previously we were doing the set up ourselves. Now, for more than a decade, we work with a third party, and we delegate the deployment, the support, and the maintenance of the Oracle Database.

The pricing of Oracle is average. It's not inexpensive but it's okay.

Currently, we are using the on-premise version on the solution.

I would rate this solution eight out of ten. I would recommend the solution because it is a good product and it's working fine. But I'm not sure if it's suitable for every consideration or any environment.

The primary use case of this solution is on disaster recovery. this software is reliable and is suited for long distances.

One of my customer's sites was a database made with Data Guard specifically because of some issues that were on the network. We found we could switch to Oracle Data Guard and it took less than one minute to switch over, which was fantastic. 

I'm constantly looking for the best solution for protecting my data in data filters, and most are powerless in terms of protecting our Oracle database. The Oracle Replication Solutions and Oracle Data Guard are the best in this area, however. The stability and resiliency are closely monitored, and you cannot find the same protection solution outside of Data Guard or Oracle RAC for protecting your data. 

It's a very good solution if you want to protect your data across two data centers, or you have a middle man or many administrators who use these solutions for protecting their data. It's very reliable compared to other solutions that are most often not storage-based.

Oracle is not easy to implement, and you cannot find clear documentation on the internet or, unfortunately, on the Oracle website. You have to do a lot of research yourself and spend a lot of time seeking out all of the best documents that are related to Oracle on other websites. If they could create more documentation and improve their library of resources, it would be very helpful.

The IP implementation and maintenance are a little bit hard to manage across Oracle solutions, including Oracle Data Guard.

I have been using the solution for more than eight years.

Oracle Data Guard is quite stable but you do need to check on it every day to ensure functionality. You have to define some of the operating system stabilities yourself and you need to be sure to deal with any problem in your operating system because good functionality really depends on the operating system. 

Scalability is good because you can cluster your Oracle Data Guard and Oracle RAC. That way you can switch to Oracle Data Guard gives you scalability, and, in comparison with other solutions, it is very stable and scalable because of these features. Most engineers prefer to use Oracle Database. Compared with other solutions, Oracle is a little bit hard to implement and maintain but as a technology, it's very good.

In terms of the number of users on the solution, it varies by project. On one of our latest projects, we had more than 10,000 people directly on the database.

Unfortunately, because of sanctions, we can't directly contact Oracle or use Oracle's knowledge base. I've indirectly contacted them because, in some cases, it's a must to have Oracle support. Sometimes you can't solve problems and you need to have accessibility to support to solve them. Support is very important in many cases because the information is crucial for many companies that want to avoid facing disasters in their data centers.

We didn't previously use a different solution. We exclusively use Oracle products.

The initial setup is very complex. Users need to be familiar with the operating system, as well as how their network and Oracle Concepts as a network, work.  

In our last implementation, deployment took between five and eight hours. There were some problems in correcting each solution on the network and then we wanted to test for its stability and we wanted to simulate the environment quality before pushing it online. 

Ultimately, we found some problems and discovered how to resolve them after a few hours. We just needed to figure out how to connect the database directly on S08 LAN. We had many issues. In one case the link of S-storage was disconnected for example. 

Some countries try to persuade that you should use all of the networks, but in some cases, you have to find your own best way forward. In this case, we found we had to connect the storage models directly through the user feature on the Oracle Database.

Implementation is not easy. Going forward, I'm going to make a script for implementation for this database, and I think it's going to be easier for implementation in the future.

For most projects, we have two people that handle the implementation of the solution. One as a solutions engineer and the other was DBA administrator. Sometimes you also may need to use a network administrator as well. At minimum, you need two experts and maybe three in some cases. You want accurate maximum availability in-network, especially on the network.

I implement this solution for some of my clients and I consult on the best way to implement the solution. Most of the information on the net is not reliable, but at this point, I'm an expert. I could write my own book on how to implement this solution for my customers. Most of the time I prefer dealing with user experience. Some firms also use ADEO to ensure my implementations are good and stable.

It is not easy to calculate of ROI of this software.

In some cases, some costumers chose to buy a lot of licenses to have software - at least at first. I'm not happy and okay with some policies of Oracle. In some cases, you have to pay extra money for some features. It's very hard to have access to software directly in comparison to buying some licenses. You can adjust them for some Oracle software, however, if you want to develop or expand your features, it's typically hard to do so in my country.

Based on my friend's and colleague's experience, they find it a little bit tricky to use Oracle for buying certain software or getting extra features, and based on my experience, most free and open-source projects are already pretty good. 

There is no redundant software as stable, and resilient data guard.

Most of my projects are on-premise, and most of them are based on low-cost engineers and information on the internet.

Right now, the cloud is really good if you change units. There is a direct limitation on some solutions because of the cost being high for this type of software and I chose not to use the cloud. 

The solution is quite functional, however, I do find that some features are not great in real production. You need to have the software to ensure the continuity in the case of using Oracle.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten due to its difficulty in terms of maintenance and audio problems. I'm also looking for CTCT maintenance and implementation and wish is was a bit easier.