Exadata Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA)

Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) is the Oracle-recommended best-practice architecture for achieving the highest availability of service with Oracle products, using Oracle’s proven high-availability technologies.

MAA best practices are published as a series of technical whitepapers and blue prints, and assist in deploying highly available Oracle-based applications and platforms that are capable of meeting and exceeding the business service-level requirements. The MAA architecture covers all components of the technology stack, includes the hardware and the software, and addresses planned and unplanned downtime.

MAA provides a framework for high availability by incorporating redundancies into the components of the technology stack, and also by utilizing certain built-in high-availability features of the Oracle software. For example, the Database Flashback feature enables you to recover from user errors such as an involuntary DROP TABLE statement by using a simple FLASHBACK TABLE command. This cuts down the recovery time drastically, which otherwise would be needed for performing a point-in-time recovery using backups.