Recently, my colleague, Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans, covered the news that Oracle was advancing its AI strategy by extending agentic AI capabilities into the Oracle AI Database as part of the company’s push for an AI-first product portfolio. Now, Oracle has announced further innovations in its AI Database, boosting both availability and security for mission-critical workloads in the AI Era.
In simple terms, these new enhancements mean companies can run AI workloads continuously, securely, and with close to zero downtime.
Here’s what Juan Loaiza, Executive Vice President, Oracle AI Database Technologies said about the enhancements:
“Oracle AI Database 26ai on Exadata now delivers Platinum-tier availability with disaster failover times typically under 30 seconds, including for high-throughput multi-node clusters. This is up to 4X faster than Oracle Database 19c without requiring application changes or performance tradeoffs.
“For the most demanding applications, Oracle Distributed AI Database and Oracle GoldenGate can deliver Diamond-tier availability with disaster failover typically under three seconds. We have also introduced new security capabilities to help address emerging risks from quantum computing and AI-driven data breaches.” Let’s break that down.
MAA Platinum-Tier Availability
Customers with Gold-tier availability, which includes most major enterprises and many government institutions, are being upgraded to Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) Platinum-tier availability. This upgrade ensures disaster failover times of typically less than 30 seconds.
Beyond this, the new tier include faster remote data transfers for both unencrypted and encrypted data, dramatically reduced downtime, sustains read access to cached data during database outages, and, for Autonomous AI Database Serverless users, zero data loss protection in the event of a full database failover.
In typical Oracle fashion, no application changes are required, and the new tier is available for all database workloads in leading cloud environments and on-premises at no extra charge when a customer upgrades Oracle Database and Exadata.
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MAA Diamond-Tier Availability
Oracle’s new Diamond-tier availability is designed to support applications running on the Exadata Platform that demand extreme reliability. This includes applications like real-time credit card processing, and disaster recovery capabilities are so fast that, from a human perspective, there’s no perceived downtime. This results in zero data loss and failover times generally under three seconds.
Within the Diamond-tier architecture, Oracle GoldenGate 26ai supports active data replication across globally distributed regions. This provides a zero data loss capability and significantly reduces disaster recovery time. Additionally, automatic conflict detection and resolution ensure that data remains consistent, even when it is updated simultaneously across multiple sites.
Ultimately, Oracle has optimized the capabilities of this tier by leveraging some of its most robust technologies, which include, as well as Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle AI Database 26ai, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Oracle Active Data Guard, Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery services, and Oracle Globally Distributed AI Database.
Security Updates
In addition to availability, the new enhancements to the Oracle AI Database also include security-focused features. New security enhancements include Oracle Deep Data Security, which reduces the risk of sensitive data exposure and supports compliance with regulations in agentic AI deployments.
It allows for the implementation of centralized, declarative authorization and data visibility policies directly within the database, based on the identity, role, and credentials of each end user. This feature automatically prevents AI agents deployed by one end user from accessing the data of another end user.
Post-Quantum Cryptography future-proofs a company’s cryptographic capabilities in the event that encrypted sensitive information captured now may be compromised by attackers utilizing quantum computing later down the line. Essentially, it’s a major step for Oracle’s customers in post-quantum readiness.
Database Security Central is designed for on-premises databases, providing a centralized view of user risk, sensitive data exposure, and configuration posture, all supported by an AI-powered security advisor.
Finally, Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery solutions provide resilience against ransomware through integrated data protection. This means that database transactions are protected in real time, featuring a new Virtual Air Gap capability and the compression of encrypted backups to enhance efficiency.
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