We have been working to roll out Data Guard in our Oracle environment for a few years now.   The issues have not been technical, so much as other priorities getting in the way.  This session grabbed my attention as I was interested to see other use cases (other than HA and DR) that we could solve with Data Guard.  Ludovico Caldara not only put on a great session, but he did an outstanding job of making the materials available prior to the session on his blog.

Because he did such a great job, I won’t bore you with a lot of the details.  But he shows you how to use Data Guard to perform online database migrations, use the standby for reporting, and perform database clones.  It is all really cool stuff that my team could leverage if we finish rolling our Data Guard.