Oracle Fail Safe is desupported in Oracle Database 21c

You may wonder about this message out of the blue. I wrote a blog post about Oracle Fail Safe being deprecated in Oracle 19c a while ago. But a customer recently pointed me to the fact that I didn’t blog about the fact that Oracle Fail Safe is desupported in Oracle Database 21c.

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Deprecated? Desupported?

A very quick recap about what deprecated and desupported mean. In short, deprecated means “we don’t develop something further but it is still fully supported”. Whereas desupported means “it may still work or may be gone, and you can’t get any fixes for it anymore”.

Please read this older blog post for the distinction between the two terms.

• What does DEPRECATED mean? What does DESUPPORTED mean?

Oracle Fail Safe Desupport in Oracle 21c

You will find the deprecation and desupport overview in the Database Upgrade Guide of the release you are looking for. But since many of you may not consider Oracle 21c but instead move one day from Oracle 19c to the next Long Term Support release, you may recognize this just a bit later.

See the Oracle 21c Upgrade Guide:

• Desupport of Oracle Fail Safe
  

  Starting with Oracle Database 21c, Oracle Fail Safe is desupported for Oracle Database releases.

  This desupport notice does not apply to earlier releases of Oracle Database. Oracle Fail Safe will continue to be supported for the lifetime of Oracle Database 19c. For Oracle Database releases starting with Oracle Database 21c, if you are running Oracle Database on Microsoft Windows, then Oracle recommends that you investigate other failover solutions, such as Oracle RAC One Node, or Oracle Database Standard Edition High Availability.

The important note here is that this Desupport note does NOT apply to Oracle Fail Safe in previous releases.

So this is just important for your future plans, and does not affect your current operations (unless you plan to move to Oracle Database 21c).

Please find more Fail Safe blog posts here.

Further Links and Information

• Oracle Fail Safe is deprecated in Oracle 19c
• What does DEPRECATED mean? What does DESUPPORTED mean
• Oracle Database 21c – Upgrade Guide – Desupport of Oracle Fail Safe
• Oracle Database 21c – Upgrade Guide – Desupported Features
• Long Term Support vs Innovation Release
• Oracle Fail Safe blog posts

–Mike