Open World Update - Oracle 12c High Availability

Quick OOW update on the Database track...

Today I attended the interesting session at Oracle Open World 2015:
Deep-Dive into High Availability with the Next Release of Oracle Database 12c [CON8827].
By Wei Ming Hu, Vice President - High Availability Technologies, Oracle

New Database 12.2 Updates

Oracle is shifting to the concept of Elastic Sharding, referencing many times in the talk about Google's sharded infrastructure for large scaling. This is essentially multiple independent nodes acting as a single logical database. These nodes do not require any shared storage or expensive clustering infrastructure. This is almost the exact opposite of RAC which requires intensive shared storage and networking requirements.

It appears this is Oracle's solution to moving into the cloud. In the cloud expensive clusterware technologies are not appropriate.

What is the underlying technology to Elastic Sharding? Active Data Guard. Oracle is beefing up the Active Data Guard technology to run the internals.
- Changes from logical sql level to block level replication.
- Redo logs will be applied to standby nearly instantly.
- Preserve all sessions during failover - allowing for online patching...etc.
- Allows for In Memory database.
- Seamlessly detect failures and evict nodes for repair.

While I am sure there always use cases, my opinion is RAC is going to be less important going forward.