Most teams have high availability (Level 1–2: node and AZ failures) but haven't tested business continuity (Level 3–4: region and cloud provider failures). The gap between "can fail over" and "will fail over cleanly" is where outages become incidents.

Four databases compared across four failure levels: Aurora and Spanner are locked to their respective clouds; CockroachDB supports cross-cloud for self-hosted but not managed clusters; OceanBase runs on seven clouds with an independent control plane for true Level 4 coverage.

Start with cross-region DR and real drills before jumping to multi-cloud. The most common failure pattern is skipping the fundamentals.

Disaster Recovery Cloud Database System Availability

Content

Four levels of failures

Why level 2 doesn't cover level 3

How OceanBase addresses DR for each level

Where to start

Five things to verify before your next DR review

What's next

Keep Reading

View all posts

PRODUCT

Exploring OceanBase 4.3: New Features and Enhancements

At the OceanBase DevCon 2024, we introduced the OceanBase 4.3.0 Beta, unveiling a brand new columnar engine. This release achieves near petabyte-scale, real-time analytics in seconds, and enhances the integration of TP and AP capabilities.

Ray YuJune 13, 2024

PRODUCT

Stop Stitching, Start Building: Get Started with OceanBase seekdb

In this post, we will skip the architecture talk and go straight to code. You go from a blank editor to a fully operational, ACID compliant hybrid search engine running entirely in user space.

Mike LiuDecember 3, 2025

PRODUCT

AI Agents Need More Than Storage. OceanBase Built It Into the Engine

AI agents hit the database hundreds of times per decision. Learn why bolted-on vector plugins and standalone vector databases fail in production — and how OceanBase 4.4.2 LTS collapses the agent data pipeline into a single SQL query.

Yingying YaoApril 17, 2026