Effective backup strategies for Oracle databases

What is Oracle backup?

Oracle backup and recovery is the process of ensuring you have complete and protected copies of all data stored in your production Oracle databases. These copies should be kept in a different system, preferably in a different physical location than the original data, and easily retrievable in case of data loss, or corruption.

An Oracle backup and recovery solution will protect Oracle databases, their instances, and Real Application Clusters (RAC) and enable database-level recovery anywhere, from any point in time. The goal is to meet your organization’s data retention, privacy, and strategic requirements while supporting development and test team requirements, ensuring compliance, and controlling costs.

Why is Oracle backup important?

Oracle databases contain some of the organization’s most critical data—from customer records to partner profiles and more. And they are often the in-production structured data systems that feed other important digital business workflows.

Application owners and database administrators (DBAs) today are challenged to protect Oracle databases that are growing in size at unprecedented rates. Growing data volumes  result from larger datasets, as well as stricter compliance and regulatory mandates requiring organizations to retain data for longer periods.

Because enterprises depend on their Oracle databases for a broad range of essential business functions, choosing the right backup and recovery solution is a critical decision. The goal is to protect the data stored on Oracle database servers against data loss and long-term outages, both of which can result in significant financial and productivity costs. Teams also want reliable Oracle backups to be able to retrieve data whenever it’s needed, from anywhere, for any reason

How do I back up my Oracle database?

Teams back up entire Oracle environments—from the data center, to the edge, to the public cloud—using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN). They also back up specific instances or Real Application Clusters (RAC) by setting specific backup policies.

In addition, they can use an Oracle backup solution from a third-party vendor that has built-in integration with native RMAN functionality to achieve application-consistent backup of all data. Deduplication and compression can significantly reduce the size of the backup files. Copies of data are then replicated and archived in the cloud.

This process is essential if something unexpected happens to your Oracle environment. If a table or cluster becomes corrupt or you lose a database instance completely, you need to be able to access and recover the data from your backups. It’s critical to test your backups to ensure that they are recoverable and will be accessible when you need them.

Teams want to be able to protect their Oracle environment on their own terms using:

• Configurable multinode and multichannel support for RAC
• Existing scripts and tools to manage infrastructure
• Automatic Oracle Wallet detection that simplifies security

Where are Oracle backup files located?

With modern data management, your Oracle backups are stored in a single, multicloud data management platform residing either on-premises or in the cloud. Your backups are immutable, meaning they cannot be accessed by external systems or people.

What is full backup in Oracle?

A full backup is a complete copy of everything in your Oracle database environment and serves as a foundation for other types of backup. From a full backup, you should be able to recover all datasets, no matter where they are located.

What is the difference between restore and recovery in Oracle?

A restore involves restoring all the files needed to bring the database back to a consistent state. A recovery is the process of applying all the transaction logs and rolling the database forward to a particular point in time.

Cohesity and Oracle Backup

Inspired by hyperscale architecture, Cohesity eliminates data and infrastructure silos in your Oracle environment by consolidating backup software, media and master servers, target storage, and a cloud gateway into a single multicloud platform.

You achieve your backup SLAs using incremental forever, application-consistent backups, ensuring rapid database recovery.

You get this with a dramatically reduced data footprint with global, variable-length sliding window deduplication and compression.

Cohesity has also eliminated disruptive and expensive forklift upgrades with nondisruptive software upgrades and expansion. The Oracle solution by Cohesity seamlessly integrates with existing scripts and tools to manage infrastructure and is natively integrated with the leading public clouds.

The ability to recover from a data disaster can make or break the future success of the business. Here are some of the many ways Cohesity’s Oracle backup solution stands apart from other products:

• It’s a single solution — Manage one distributed, scale-out solution for your growing Oracle database environment.
• It’s faster backups — Experience dramatically faster incremental forever, application-consistent backups.
• It improves ransomware protection and speeds recovery — Maintain immutable snapshots as fully hydrated snaps to ensure your backup data stays protected and that if production is compromised, you can recover quickly at scale at any point in time.
  
• It’s lower TCO — Reduce your data center footprint with global deduplication and data reuse for dev/test.