Data Guard is great. I love Data Guard. But more often than not I see it being misunderstood and sometimes misconfigured.

This session goes beyond standard Data Guard implementations, empowering attendees to harness the full potential of synchronous replication. We will explore critical, often-overlooked configurations and advanced features essential for building truly resilient and performant disaster recovery solutions.

In my talk, we'll cover the following:
- The topology - what to consider and where to place your observers, lessons learned (what you should NOT do) and some less obvious tips.
- How to plan your deployments of DG, and how to test them correctly to avoid surprises.
- SYNC/(NO)AFFIRM - what to look out for when you decide to go full SYNC, and how to correctly measure its impact on your system (related wait events, rfs traces with examples).

DEMO: We'll go through a real example of a spotty network and identifying the issue using ASH/AWR metrics and a follow-up of going through the RFS traces.

- Split-brain - and how to address it correctly. Letting your primary database shut down automatically is scary. We'll go over setting up the minimum required environment to keep things safe and the most common pitfalls. This is a balancing act of application uptime requirements and keeping your data consistent.

DEMO: I'll show some examples of what NOT to do with your FSFO settings. Seemingly correct and sensible settings which may have disastrous consequences.

- Benefits of using DataGuard together with RAC. What does it enable and how impactful are they? We'll glance over application continuity and FAN.
- Data Guard in Multitenant - what it can and cannot do on 19c (and what's improved in 21c and 23ai).

This session focuses on the more advanced topics. It is designed for DBAs and architects who are planning to use DG as their primary DR technology. It assumes basic knowledge of Data Guard and it will not go over the basics.