This category requires us to have a “Mounted Physical Standby”. This term refers to a type of backup database in Oracle that is in mounted mode, meaning it is ready to receive redo data from the primary server but is not open for read or write access.

Our recommendation:

• Enable Oracle Database Autonomous Recovery Service, a fully managed and centralised cloud backup solution for databases on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The advantage of this solution is that it offers continuous incremental backups, avoiding the need to run full backups and the associated performance decrease. Additionally, with the Real Time option, we replicate the redo logs, achieving RPO times of seconds.
• Make an additional backup copy in another location: This method involves performing automated backups on OCI, where the data is stored in triple redundant object storage. This means that each piece of data is replicated to three different locations within the object storage, providing high availability and durability of the data.

This category implies a significant leap in availability compared to the Bronze category, requiring the main database in an active-active configuration and a standby database in another location. To implement MAA Silver, our recommendation is to opt for the Autonomous Database service.

Oracle Autonomous Database meets the MAA Silver level (Maximum Availability Architecture) in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) due to several key features that guarantee high availability and data protection:

• Design on RAC by default: Autonomous Databases are configured in a multi-node environment using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). This allows failover to another node in case of unplanned failures or during scheduled maintenance.
• Backup and Recovery: Automatic database backups are stored in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage and replicated to another availability domain, ensuring that data is protected and can be restored in the event of a disaster.
• Can be combined with the Autonomous Recovery Service to improve performance during backups and enable the Real-Time option to improve RPO.

The Gold category in the MAA programme includes several specific services designed to ensure high availability, disaster recovery, performance optimisation, and enhanced security.

This standard requires a local standby database with backup and a standby database in another region with its respective backup.

In OCI with Autonomous Database, we can implement it using the Disaster Recovery option with Autonomous Data Guard and associate it with a Cross-Region Peer.