Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports additional regions for Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups of replica instances (read-only and mounted) deployed within an Availability Zone, or in separate Availability Zones of a given Region, or in separate AWS Regions.

The Oracle Data Guard Switchover feature allows you to reverse the roles between the primary database and one of its standby databases (replicas) with no data loss and a brief outage. You will need an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition (EE) license to use replicas in mounted mode, and an additional Oracle Active Data Guard license to use replicas in read-only mode. Please check with your legal team or a licensing expert to confirm whether your Oracle license(s) cover your specific use case.

You can also now create Automated Backups and manual DB snapshots of an RDS for Oracle replica, which reduces the time spent taking backups following a role transition. Furthermore, you can create a new DB instance by restoring from such DB snapshot or perform a point-in-time recovery.

These two new features are now available in the following additional regions: Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Canada West (Calgary), Europe (Milan), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), Israel (Tel Aviv), Middle East (Bahrain), Middle East (UAE), and US West (N. California).

To learn more about these new features, please visit the Amazon RDS for Oracle documentation page.