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If you are one of the many Oracle Enterprise Edition customers, chances are you may know about Oracle Data Guard. Many Oracle customers use Data Guard for their disaster recovery protection, as well as for high availability through nifty features like Fast-Start Failover (FSFO). Mission critical production databases are often large in size. Creating one or more standby databases when setting up a Data Guard configuration could take a long time, and require a large amount of additional storage.

Let’s just say you have passed those pain points of setting up a Data Guard configuration and you have a nice working Data Guard configuration with a few standby databases. What about testing your Data Guard configuration to validate that it meets your requirements? How do you know if you can truly achieve the target failover time in the event of a disaster, or how much data loss you would have post-failover if you choose a particular Data Guard log transport mode? Today, customers with Data Guard configuration can attempt test failover or switchover to verify these metrics based on their actual production database data. However, this would require scheduled downtime, something that is often not easy to come by with mission critical production databases.