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Why this release matters
Standard Edition 2 (SE2) is the sensible choice, as it carries a significantly lower licensing cost than Enterprise Edition and comfortably covers the needs of most small and mid-sized deployments. What SE2 does not include is Oracle Data Guard, which remains an Enterprise Edition feature. That single gap is why disaster recovery on Standard Edition has always required a different approach, and it is precisely the gap that Dbvisit StandbyMP was built to fill. So the arrival of 26ai SE2 on-premises is more than just another release on the calendar. It is the version a meaningful portion of our customers will run in production, which makes confirming Dbvisit support a priority rather than a formality.
Rather than dwell on the fact that we had missed it, credit goes to our European territory manager, Rado, for bringing the release to our attention. I didn't want to delay any further, so I began testing straight away.
Installation
Installation was smooth and straightforward, exactly as it should be. The process behaved no differently from earlier 23ai releases, with no surprises along the way.
Setting up the standby with Dbvisit
Configuring Dbvisit was equally uneventful, in the best possible sense. We created the standby database without incident and then moved into a series of tests designed to confirm that every core function behaves exactly as it does on the editions we already support.
Feature validation results
We worked through the full set of Dbvisit StandbyMP functions to confirm that each one behaves correctly against Oracle 26ai Standard Edition. The results are summarised below.
|
Function |
Test results (Yes/No) |
|
Synchronisation |
Yes |
|
Graceful switchover and switchback |
Yes |
|
DR Testing |
Yes |
|
Database in read-only mode |
Yes |
|
Add New PDB |
Yes |
|
Snapshots |
Yes |
|
Observer Notifications |
Yes |
|
Failover |
Yes |
|
Intelligent Activate |
Yes |
|
Automatic Failover |
Yes |
|
Changing DDC Parameters |
Yes |
Going Further: Zero Data Loss (ZDL)
We didn't stop at the standard feature set. Zero Data Loss (ZDL) is one of the more demanding capabilities to validate, since it protects committed transactions right up to the point of failure, so it was the natural thing to test next. On 26ai SE2, it worked perfectly. For customers running Standard Edition, that is a significant result: a genuine zero-data-loss posture on the latest on-premises release, with Dbvisit doing the heavy lifting.
The verdict
Across installation, standby creation, the full range of switchover, failover and DR-testing functions, and Zero Data Loss, every test we ran completed successfully. We can therefore confirm that Dbvisit fully supports Oracle 26ai Standard Edition on-premises. If you are running, or planning to run, SE2 on this release, your disaster recovery is covered.
