Well, as jim stated you're(if i understand correctly) looking for a standby database/or in 9i called as a dataguard in managed recovery mode(meaning archived logfile's being shipped automatically) there are certain parameter's you'll have to setup to decide the urgency of the shipping and/or validation of block corruptions(so that before a block corruption) reaches the standby database, you get to know.
but still better read the doc's, it's very interesting.