Lesson 1

This course, Backup and Recovery Concepts, is the first of three in the Oracle8: Backup Recovery series. Taken together these three courses will help you to plan and implement a backup and recovery strategy for your Oracle8 database.

The first course in this series will provide a good understanding of the issues involved in defining an effective backup and recovery strategy. By the end of this course, you should be able to:

1. List the key issues involved when defining an effective backup and recovery strategy
2. List the Oracle architecture components related to backup and recovery operations
3. List the components of the recovery manager architecture

Oracle is a complex, interrelated set of files and executables. With Oracle11g and Oracle12g it has not become any easier. The database files include data segments, redo logs, rollback segments, control files, libraries, and system areas. Each of these files is not a separate entity but is tightly linked to the components. For instance, the data files are repositories for all table data. The data file structure is controlled by the control file, implemented by the system areas, and maintained by a combination of the executables, redo, and rollback segments. Data files reference bfiles^[1] that are tied to external procedures stored in libraries that are referenced in procedures stored in data files. This complexity leads to the requirement of a threefold backup recovery methodology to ensure that data recovery can be made. The next lesson describes the prerequisites to this course.

[1]bfile: A bfile, is contained within the file system but outside the database.