Since GoldenGate Version 10.x, Oracle Corporation has included their Active Data Guard product within the GoldenGate license. As a disaster recovery solution, a Physical Standby database provides an exact copy of its primary database, which is superlative and is now tightly integrated with GoldenGate. Features such as log shipping and Data Guard FSFO are now part of the integrated bundle.

The Physical Standby element of Data Guard is quite different from GoldenGate's changed data capture and delivery. Although both solutions have a target database that is OPEN, the Standby database is READ ONLY and in managed recovery mode. This means that data changes are applied at the block level via Oracle's database recovery mechanism and not via the SQL or LCR API. The Primary and Physical Standby databases can also be automatically switched or failed over. The reason being both databases are mirrored copies sharing the same database name.

GoldenGate is typically licensed by the CPU core and...