Oracle 19c no longer supports RAC in SE

What will change?

The big change is in the use of SE2 RAC. If Oracle 18c SE2 and below is used, RAC can still be used. Oracle has not yet decided when Premier Support for 18c will end, but in good Oracle practice, this is likely to be two years after the release of Oracle 19c, likely March or April 2021. If we assume that most companies migrate their hardware about every 3 to 5 years, you see that an upgrade to 19c is necessary to be covered by Oracle Premier Support for the life of the hardware.

Oracle 19c

As of Oracle version 19c, the use of RAC is no longer allowed in Standard Edition2 (SE2). For more information, see the “database licensing information user manual” available at https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/dblic/Licensing-Information.html#GUID-B6113390- 9586-46D7-9008-DCC9EDA45AB4 (table 1.9 scalability)

What to do?

Evaluate why your company uses RAC and whether it is still necessary. Are there, for example, requirements from the business that do not allow downtime or make online patching impossible? Or is load balancing the main reason RAC is used? DBA.nl can advise you to map out your wishes and requirements and to find a suitable solution.

If high availability is required, there are the following four options.
1. Move to Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) with RAC. DBA.nl can advise you on the number of EE and RAC licenses you need and help you to perform this license upgrade.
2. Move to the public cloud. DBA.nl can help you with this. Keep in mind that RAC is not available in every Cloud solution and that you must have the correct number of licenses.
3. Keep current Standard Edition licenses and start using the Oracle Autonomous Database. An autonomous database is a cloud database that uses machine learning to eliminate the human labor normally required for database tuning, security, backups, updates, and other routine management tasks traditionally performed by database administrators (DBAs).
4. Oracle will release an update to Oracle 19c at the end of 2020 that will make a new option available, namely SE2 High Availability. This makes it possible to make a database highly available using Grid-Infrastructure Cluster layer which also makes the RAC functionality possible, only not two but one instance are created per database. This means that things like load balancing and seamless failover of sessions are no longer possible. What does remain is the high availability. Not by means of an Active/Active Cluster but by means of a failover Cluster.
See view below:

When no data loss is more important than availability, the following options are possible:

DataGuard
RAC is a high availability option for your environment. If Disaster Recovery is necessary, Oracle Enterprise Edition users can configure this (or have this configured) in Oracle Dataguard so that the primary database remains in sync with the standby/failover database located elsewhere.

DBvisit
In Oracle Standard Edition 2 it is also perfectly possible to configure a standby/failover database. In this case, DBA.nl recommends the use of Dbvisit. Depending on the situation, this can be an attractive solution. DBA.nl can advise you on this.