Recently I made a post about a little issue that I got with Oracle Data Guard. In that scenario, because of outage in the standby datacenter, healthy primary database shutdown with error “ORA-16830: primary isolated…”. Just to remember that the database was running with Maximum Availability, Fail-Start Failover enabled, and (the most important detail) the Observer was running in the standby datacenter too.
The point from my previous post tried to show that does not exists one doc that provides full details about “pros” and “cons” where put your observer. Whatever the place, on the primary datacenter or in standby, it has little details to check. Even the best (ideal) scenario, with a third datacenter, can be tough to sustain.
Here I will try to show one option that can help you and improve the reliability of your MAA/DG environment. At least, you will have more options to decide how to protect your database. Bellow, I show some details about how to configure and use multiple observers, but if you want to jump and see a little concern you can directly to the end of the post.