Professional Documents
Culture Documents
INTRODUCTION
Database backup, restore and recovery are critical processes underlying any mission-critical system. Imagine the potential for lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction or unrecoverable information caused by a media failure or similar disaster. Long term projects, key customer information or new orders could be lost. A well-implemented data backup and recovery strategy is a cornerstone for every deployment, making it possible to restore and recover all or part of a database without data loss. With the release of Oracle8 extensive backup and recovery functionality was added in a new utility. The Recovery Manager provided an integrated method for creating, managing and restoring backups of a database. Recovery Manager addresses the following requirements of a comprehensive database backup and recovery system:
Backing up a database must be performed without interrupting current business functions. Recovery operations must be performed with minimal impact on the business processing. Due to the large sizes of databases, backup sizes need to be proportional to the size of transactional changes on the system, not proportional to the size of the database itself. Recovery time must be proportional to the amount of data being recovered.
The objective in creating the Recovery Manager was to provide greater ease of management and administration of the backup and recovery operations while maintaining superior performance and increased availability of the database.
PROXY COPY
Recovery Manager controls the integration of the database server directly, using a tape media management system which is compliant with Oracles System Backup to Tape (SBT) tape media management application programming interface (API). This allows customers to choose from a variety of tape media management subsystems and enables Oracle to read or write tape volumes perhaps in a tape library directly. The Oracle8i server can integrate with any media management software that is compliant with Oracle's Media Management API. This allows customers to choose from a variety of tape media management subsystems, and enables Oracle to read or write backups on non-disk media such as tapes and to use automated tape libraries. In Oracle8i, the Media Management API has been enhanced to allow the bulk I/O of creating and restoring database backups to be off-loaded from the Oracle host to the media manager. This makes it possible, during full online or offline backups, for the Oracle database server to not be directly involved in the reading or writing process. Thus, media managers that directly integrate disk and tape storage subsystems can perform data movement between disk and tape at the speed of the underlying devices, freeing host CPU resources, and reducing the impact on application response time of backup or restore workloads.
This capability is known as "proxy copy" because Oracle selects the media manager as a proxy to actually copy data to or from tape and will be supported by a number of media management vendor partners in Oracle's Backup Solutions Program (BSP).
DISK AFFINITY
In Oracle Parallel Server configurations, the speed of access to disks may not be uniform across the nodes of the cluster. One or more nodes may have "affinity" for a particular set of disks, which means that access to these disks from these nodes is more efficient than from other nodes. Recovery Manager in Oracle8i is aware of this affinity when scheduling backups and restores and attempts to schedule datafile backups on channels allocated at nodes that have affinity to those files.
The ALL keyword is added to list all backup sets in the catalog, whether usable by the current database incarnation or not.
CLONE COMMAND
The clone command enables the creation of a replicated database (clone) using the backups stored in the media manager from another database. This replicated database can be given a different DBNAME or have the same DBNAME as the one just cloned. One possible use of a clone
database is to create a safe environment for testing backup and recovery procedures from a real, production database.
The recovery catalog is stored in an Oracle8i database. The recommended approach is to use an alternate database to contain the recovery catalog for the target database being backed up. That way, a media loss on one database does not affect the recovery catalog, since it resides on a different database. For example, a production database can be backed up and managed with a recovery catalog that resides on a work station database, and that database can be backed up and managed with a recovery catalog that resides on the production database. This way, the workstation and production databases can provide comprehensive backup facilities for each other. It is critical that the recovery catalog be backed up also, to avoid any possibility of it being a single point of failure. It can then be backed up and recovered using the Oracle8i Recovery Manager facility, since it resides within an Oracle8i database. Larger sites with multiple Oracle8i systems installed may create a single recovery catalog to maintain backup and recovery information for all their Oracle8i databases. This greatly simplifies maintenance and administration of multiple databases. The recovery catalog can also be located at a remote site, separate from the target database or databases. This helps minimize the impact of any failure, since it is very unlikely that a recovery operation will be needed on the target database while there is a simultaneous failure of the remote recovery catalog database. The database server performs various integrity checks on the backup files used for a restore operation.
BACKUP TYPES
Oracle8i supports four basic methods of backups:
Backup Sets Incremental Backups (Must Be Part of a Backup Set) Datafile Copies Operating System Generated Backups
A backup set contains one or more input files of the same type, either datafiles or archive logs. This greatly simplifies backup file management, since multiple files may be backed up into one output file, so there are fewer files to store and manage. A particular backup file from the backup set must then be extracted with a restore operation by the Recovery Manager. Backup sets can be full or incremental backups of the files, taken while the database was open or closed. A backup is made up of one or more datafiles that contains all blocks of the datafile that have ever been used. Oracle8i allows you to create and restore full backups of datafiles, tablespaces, archive logs, control files and the database in its entirety for maximum manageability and flexibility. An incremental backup is a backup of one or more datafiles that contains only those blocks (at the same or a lower level), that have been modified since a previous backup. File size of backups is greatly reduced, since only modified blocks need to be backed up, instead of all blocks of the datafiles. Oracle8i allows you to create and restore incremental backups of datafiles, tablespaces, and the database. A datafile copy contains a single input datafile that can be used as is to perform recovery. No restore operation is needed to use it, thereby saving the time normally needed to restore the file. Sites that require true high availability benefit from this feature, because it allows the system to become available for work as quickly as possible. This type of file is created by Recovery Manager as a "fuzzy" copy of a single file, taken (if desired)
while the database is online and being updated. Simply point the control file directly at the backup copy and media recovery is performed to make the copy current. This type of backup is only allowed to disk, so the copy can be used "as is," without a restore operation. The recovery catalog is then updated to indicate that the copy has been "consumed;" in other words, the file copy is no longer available for any future use as a backup. Not having to restore the backup file saves a great deal of time, thereby making the recovered data available faster. The only additional downtime needed is the time required to do the actual recovery operation on that backup file. Operating system-generated backups created externally to Oracle are fully supported and usable under Oracle8i and may be tracked by the recovery catalog as a full, level 0 backup that can be used as a basis for subsequent incremental backups.
cumulative backups require more space and time to create because they duplicate the work done by previous backups at the same level.
Multiple backup or recovery sessions can be executed concurrently. Recovery Manager may parallelize its operation, establishing multiple logon sessions and conducting multiple conversations in parallel. Concurrent sessions must operate on disjoint sets of database files. Parallelization of backup, copy, and restore commands is handled automatically by the Recovery Manager. Recovery Manager establishes one database connection to the target database for each sequential I/O device. The administrator only needs to specify a list of one or more sequential I/O devices, and the objects to be backed up, copied, or restored. Parallelism is exploited within the context of a single command. So, if copies of 10 datafiles are needed, it is better to issue a single COPY command that specifies all ten copies, instead of issuing ten separate copy commands.
10
Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: +1.650.506.7000 Fax +1.650.506.7200 http://www.oracle.com/ Copyright Oracle Corporation 1999 All Rights Reserved This document is provided for informational purposes only, and the information herein is subject to change without notice. Please report any errors herein to Oracle Corporation. Oracle Corporation does not provide any warranties covering and specifically disclaims any liability in connection with this document. Oracle is a registered trademark, and Oracle8i and Oracle8 are trademarks of Oracle Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.