Introduction to Oracle backup and recovery

Backup is nothing but the copy of your real database that you will use to reconstruct your data means recovery.

Now a day’s information and data is soul of organizations. As a responsible DBA it’s your primary duty to devise, configure, and manage a backup & recovery strategy. The primary purpose of a backup & recovery is to recovery of your database in case of worst situation like data loss in any sense.

Basically Backup Database Administrator having following responsibilities/task:

  • Plan a zero impact database backup strategy.
  • Implement it on test server before actual production environment.
  • Configure production environment for backup & recovery.
  • Setting up proper backup schedule.
  • Monitor and manage the backup & recovery.
  • Troubleshooting backup issues.
  • In case of data lost, recover database.
  • RMAN – Recovery Manager
  • User Managed backup
  • Data Pump Export-Import

Types of oracle backups available

  • RMAN – Recovery Manager
  • User Managed backup
  • Data Pump Export-Import

Note: In my next article, I will explore about the types of oracle backups in depth.

 

Let’s understand backup and recovery need in-depth with Data Protection, Data Prevention & Data Transfer.

Data Protection

As responsibility of backup DBA, your first job is to make backup available and monitoring it for the data protection. There is two types of backups, one is Physical backup and another is Logical backup.

Physical backup terms as physical database files like data files, control files and archived redo log files, or we can say that physical backups are the foundation of backup and recovery. And Logical backup terms as logical data like tables, stored procedures, views, etc.  Oracle Data pump is used to backup logical data to binary files. We can say that Logical backups are useful supplement to physical backups.

In following case, exclusively need DBA intervention:

If Media Failure occurs:

Media failure is nothing but the problem with physical files on physical disk block read/write.

 

If User Error occurs:

User error is nothing but any manual mistake done by user like any record or table deleted unfortunately, OR error in application logic OR it could be anything done by users.

Proper user, security and privilege management and training can prevent these kind of user errors. Your smart backup strategy will decide and recover your database in case of user errors.

 

If Application Error occurs:

Many times inappropriate developed application software malfunctions corrupt data blocks/media corruption. Database unable to recognize physical blocks and checksum also invalid.

This could be recovery with the help of Block Media Recovery.

 

Data Preservation:

Data preservation is nothing but the data protection, but this data is used for the different purpose.

You may come across the case where client requires or demands data of 10 OR 15 years old. This is not the part of disaster recovery or anything else. This types of backups also called as archival backup.

Data Transfer:

Many times we need to take database backup and move it to another location for x y z reasons.

 

This is all about the small introduction to Oracle backup and recovery, In my next article I will cover “Various Oracle Backup and Recovery Solutions available”

Stay tune. 🙂

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