Oracle Active Data Guard extends Oracle Data Guard functionality with advanced features, allowing read-only access to data in a physical standby database to offload primary of such tasks as reporting, ad-hoc queries, data extraction and backup, offloading redo transport and minimizing standby impact on commit response times (using Far Sync feature), providing option for rolling upgrades for non-RAC customers, managing clients workload across replicated database and improving automated service failover (using Global Data Services), etc.