Running mission-critical applications across multiple regions is rarely straightforward. Data must be kept close to end users to avoid latency, synchronized across locations to maintain uptime, and stored in jurisdictions that satisfy data residency laws. Hitting all three goals at once often forces enterprises into complex and expensive setups that are difficult to manage over time.
Oracle’s new Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure is aimed at that problem. It is a fully managed, serverless database service built to run across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions without the need for custom multi-region configurations.
The system is designed to stay online during regional outages while supporting heavy workloads such as agentic AI, real-time analytics, and high-volume transactions.
Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, said the service’s combination of distributed architecture and Exadata performance could be a “game changer” for AI workloads, particularly those needing fast vector processing across multiple locations. He pointed to its hyper-elastic, pay-per-use model as a cost-effective way to meet the data locality and resilience demands of global applications.
Rather than relying on separate clusters tied together with custom scripts, the service applies built-in distribution policies to decide where data should be stored and how it should be moved. Synchronization is handled through Raft replication, a consensus protocol that maintains consistency and allows zero data loss failover across sites. As it retains the full Oracle Database feature set and SQL interface, existing applications and security policies can be shifted into a global setup without major rewrites.
This design removes much of the operational burden around replication management, compliance auditing, and failover testing. It is intended to give enterprises predictable performance and resilience while avoiding the cost and engineering trade-offs that often come with multi-region deployments.
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Oracle sees the offering as a way to make global database deployments practical for a wider range of organizations. “Customers often struggle to deploy and manage distributed databases due to the high cost and complexity involved in operating large numbers of servers across multiple data centers and regions,” said Wei Hu, senior vice president, High Availability Technologies, Oracle.
“Oracle Globally Distributed Exadata Database on Exascale Infrastructure’s serverless architecture enables customers of all sizes to meet their diverse requirements at a low cost. Today, we are providing a mission-critical distributed database to the masses.”
The system runs in an active-active configuration across multiple Oracle Cloud regions, with each site capable of handling live traffic. Raft consensus ensures updates are applied in the same order across locations, preventing conflicts and allowing instant failover without data loss.
A shared compute and storage pool is managed by Exascale’s serverless control layer, which provisions capacity automatically as workloads change. Remote direct memory access helps shorten query paths, and predictive preprocessing speeds up complex operations. Built-in data placement rules determine where information resides to meet regulatory or performance needs, reducing the need for manual configuration and ongoing cross-region monitoring.
This new Oracle service supports AI applications that perform vector searches and inference near users to keep latency low and responsiveness high. It also manages real-time analytics pipelines that pull data from different locations, providing industries such as finance and telecommunications with timely insights.
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Another potential benefit is that core transaction systems, such as global payment processing and fraud detection, can run alongside newer workloads, letting businesses manage everything within a single distributed database rather than maintaining multiple separate platforms.
Managing data across borders also brings regulatory challenges. Oracle’s platform aims to tackle this by automatically placing data where laws require it to stay, making it easier for companies in highly regulated fields such as healthcare and finance to comply with rules like GDPR and HIPAA. Embedding these controls into the database itself helps reduce the need for complex manual oversight or separate compliance tools.
This new offering also puts Oracle in more direct competition with distributed SQL databases like CockroachDB and YugabyteDB. Unlike those NoSQL-first systems, Oracle relies on its long-standing enterprise presence by providing full SQL support and engineered hardware solutions. This makes Oracla particularly attractive for customers focused on AI-driven workloads and global data management.
With many cloud providers offering similar distributed database services, Oracle highlights its claims of significantly faster query speeds and a flexible, serverless architecture. The company aims to make these mission-critical global databases more accessible to a wider range of organizations beyond just the largest enterprises, and it appears to be on its way to doing that.
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