Announcing New Amazon RDS for Oracle Capabilities and Multi-AZ Enhancements

From: Amazon Web Services 

Subject:  Announcing New Amazon RDS for Oracle Capabilities and Multi-AZ Enhancements

Date: Thu, 3 May 2012 08:30:05 +0000 (UTC)

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,
We are excited to announce new Amazon RDS for Oracle http://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle service capabilities and Multiple Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) deployment improvements.
    - New Multi-AZ deployment capability for Amazon RDS for Oracle

    - New Console and API option to trigger a failover from primary to standby for Amazon RDS for Oracle and MySQL

    - New Multiple Character set support for Amazon RDS for Oracle
New Multi-AZ deployment capability for Amazon RDS for Oracle
Multi-AZ is a deployment option that significantly enhances database availability by synchronously replicating updates made to a primary DB instance to a standby instance located in a separate Availability Zone (AZ) within the same AWS Region. Many Amazon RDS MySQL customers already use the Multi-AZ option to increase the reliability of their production deployments and we are excited to make this feature available to Amazon RDS for Oracle customers.
With this new feature, Amazon RDS for Oracle customers can enjoy the same benefits without requiring any additional administrative overhead. Customers can add the Multi-AZ option to any Oracle instance with a simple console operation or API call. Multi-AZ is available immediately for new and existing Amazon RDS for Oracle instances and all supported Oracle Editions: Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One.
With Multi-AZ enabled, your Amazon RDS for Oracle instance will automatically failover to your standby instance in many common failure scenarios so you can resume database operations as quickly as possible. In addition to failure recovery, Multi-AZ also helps minimize interruptions due to patches and snapshots. Patches are applied first to the standby and then to the primary and snapshots are taken from the standby so the primary can continue serving requests.
New Console and API Option to trigger a Failover in Multi-AZ deployments
Many customers have requested the ability to initiate a failover from their primary to their standby DB instance. The typical use cases for this feature include testing the resilience of a new application by forcing a failover. The results can help customers tune DNS caching and connection retry mechanisms. To support this and other use cases, Amazon RDS has added a new console and API option to give Multi-AZ customers the ability to trigger a failover from primary to standby when rebooting a DB instance. This option is available immediately for Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for Oracle.
New Multiple Character Set Support Option for Amazon RDS for Oracle
Oracle provides the capability to set a character set preference that controls which languages you can represent in your database. Amazon RDS for Oracle now enables customers to specify their preferred character sets when creating new DB instances. Customers can now specify any of thirty character sets, including Shift-JIS, when creating new DB instances.
To learn more about Multi-AZ and Character Set Support for Amazon RDS for Oracle and the ability to failover on reboot for all Multi-AZ customers, please visit the Amazon RDS for Oracle Detail Page[1] and the Amazon RDS FAQs[2] and Documentation[3]. 
If you are new to Amazon RDS, you can get started for free with our sixty-day free trial.
Thank you for being an Amazon Web Services customer.
Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team.
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[1] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs

[3] http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/rds

[4] https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account/index.html/xxxxxx?ie=UTF8&action=edit-communication-preferences