Preface
Knowledge is only valuable when shared.
The three main responsibilities for a successful DBA are to ensure the availability, recoverability, and performance of any database that the DBA is accountable for. This book will focus on the recoverability set of skills, and will also include some tips and ideas regarding availability. All examples showed in the book are executed over Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.4 and Oracle Database 12.1.0.1 (also known as Oracle 12c), please be aware of these specific versions to ensure that you will be able to reproduce the same results, you will see reflected in this book.
To ensure the recoverability of any database, a DBA needs to have a strong backup and recovery skills set; this knowledge is essential for any good DBA. Without this knowledge, you will be in violation of my most important rule that I have used in my entire career, "The most important rule with respect to data is to never put yourself into an unrecoverable situation". If you follow this simple tip every time you work with data, I can guarantee that you will be always protected against any possible situation that could surprise you in your daily journey, including of course the unexpected ones.
My key intention by writing this book is that if you are a new DBA, introduce you to this fantastic world that is vital to your success. If you are an experienced DBA, this book will become a reference guide and will also help you to learn some possible new skills, or give some new ideas that you never knew about. It will also help you to easily find the solution to some of the most well-known problems you could find during your career, and this book will be rich with screenshots, full of scripts, examples, and tutorials that you will find more than useful and handy.
Most of the books currently available in the market only concentrate on the RMAN utility for backup and recovery; this book will be an exception to the rule and will become a must-have reference to allow you to achieve a real complete backup and recovery strategy. This is not in any case a replacement to the official Oracle documentation available at http://www.oracle.com/pls/db121/homepage; I will always recommend to any serious DBA to read the complete documentation set as a complement to this book.
This book contains my knowledge of more than two decades working with Oracle technologies and also shows several topics and situations that came to my attention when speaking at several conferences around the world or helping others on Oracle forums or virtual communities.
I hope you will enjoy reading this book as the same way I enjoyed writing it.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Understanding the Basics of Backup and Recovery, covers topics such as understanding the need for creating backups, getting familiar with the different backup types, an overview of backup strategy, understanding what is redo and how it affects your database recoverability, and understanding database operational modes and redo generation.
Chapter 2, NOLOGGING Operations, covers topics such as LOGGING versus NOLOGGING, disabling redo generation, NOLOGGING operations, how to reduce redo generation, redo log wait events, practice with some interesting scripts, and much more interesting topics.
Chapter 3, What is New in 12c, covers topics such as pluggable database, RMAN's new features and enhancements, and Data Pump's new features and enhancements.
Chapter 4, User-managed Backup and Recovery, covers backup and recovery using user-managed methods. Understanding the basics involving a manual backup and recovery will help you to easily understand what is going on in the background of your database when using RMAN and it will also help you to compare and easily understand all benefits of using RMAN against any other backup method when working with Oracle.
Chapter 5, Understanding RMAN and Simple Backups, describes that being the custodians of databases, DBA's should always try to minimize the loss of data. This can be accomplished through an effective strategy that enables us to secure a backup of these databases that can be accessed in case of systemic failures. However, it is rightly said that any strategy is as good as the tool that implements it. In this chapter, we shall introduce you to a tool that's just like one of those super heroes that can fix almost any issue. So in the list of such amazing heroes such as Superman and Batman, please welcome RMAN, the Recovery Manager—Oracle's one stop solution for both backups and recoveries.
Chapter 6, Configuring and Recovering with RMAN, looks into the two abilities of RMAN, that is, how to configure it and how to use it for doing database recoveries.
Chapter 7, RMAN Reporting and Catalog Management, discusses about the topics such as benefits of recovery catalog, creation and use of recovery catalog, using the CATALOG command, and RMAN reporting using the LIST and REPORT commands.
Chapter 8, RMAN Troubleshooting and Tuning, looks at various ways to get the best performance from RMAN and also techniques to troubleshoot it when it won't behave itself.
Chapter 9, Understanding Data Pump, describes about Data Pump and its architecture, new concepts with Data Pump, methods to move data, and play with many Data Pump scenarios.
Chapter 10, Advanced Data Pump, covers topics such as data masking, build a metadata repository, create a version control, clone users (create a new user using an existent user as a template), create smaller copies of production, create your database in a different file structure, move all objects from one tablespace to another, move a object to a different schema (a simple example, change a table owner), migrate data for a database upgrade, downgrade an Oracle database, transport a tablespace, and use Data Pump with flashback.
Chapter 11, OEM12c and SQL Developer, discusses topics such as configuring our backup and recovery settings (including catalog settings) in OEM12c, scheduling backups in OEM12c, creating restore points in OEM12c, understanding database export/import operations in OEM12c, and getting familiar with the SQL developer.
Appendix: Scenarios and Examples – A Hands-on Lab, allows you to practice some of the scenarios you saw in this book (step-by-step) and learn by practice. If you have any doubt about a command of what it will be doing, please refer to the corresponding chapter in this book for more information.
What you need for this book
To be able to reproduce all scenarios in this book you will need the following software:
Oracle VirtualBox, you can download Oracle VirtualBox (free virtualization tool) at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.4 , you can download it (free) from https://edelivery.oracle.com/linux
Oracle 12.1.0.1 database for Linux that you can download (free) from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/database12c-linux-download-1959253.html
Who this book is for
This book is designed for Oracle DBAs and system administrators. The reader will have a basic working experience of administering Oracle databases. This book will become a reference guide and will also help you to learn some new skills, and give you some new ideas you never knew about, helping you to easily find the solution to some of the most well-known problems you could encounter as DBAs. This book is designed to be understood even by beginners who have just started with the Oracle database. Due to this, any person with a basic working experience of administering an Oracle database will be able to completely understand this book.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "If a directory object is not specified, a default directory object called DATA_PUMP_DIR is provided".
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
SQL> GRANT DATAPUMP_EXP_FULL_DATABASE, DATAPUMP_IMP_FULL_DATABASE TO fcomunoz;
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking on the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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