Techniques used in an automatic failover configuration having a primary database system, a standby database system, and an observer. In the automatic failover configuration, the primary database system remains available even in the absence of both the standby and the observer as long as the standby and the observer become absent sequentially. The failover configuration may use asynchronous transfer modes to transfer redo to the standby and permits automatic failover only when the observer is present and the failover will not result in data loss due to the asynchronous transfer mode beyond a specified maximum. The database systems and the observer have copies of failover configuration state and the techniques include techniques for propagating the most recent version of the state among the databases and the observer and techniques for using carefully-ordered writes to ensure that state changes are propagated in a fashion which prevents divergence.