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Oracle Backup and Recovery Certification Series

Backup and Recovery Options and Methods


  1. Backup and Recovery Concepts, the first course, and
  2. Backup and Recovery Tools, the third course,
complete your preparation for Exam #1Z0-015, Oracle: Backup and Recovery Workshop.
For more information on other courses that can help you obtain Oracle certification, please visit the Sitemap page.

Oracle 10g Availability Enhancements, Part 1: Backup and Recovery Improvements

Oracle 10g offers significant enhancements that help insure the high availability of any Oracle database, especially in the arena of disaster recovery. This article concentrates on several new features available for backup, restoration, and recovery of Oracle databases, especially when using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN). Oracle 10g expands significantly the RMAN backup, restoration, and recovery features that I have grown to appreciate. Flash Backup and Recovery appears to be the most exciting improvement, and I will cover that in greater detail in the next article in this series, but for now, this article will focus on numerous significant features that beg for illustration.

Backup Enhancements

Expanded Image Copying Features. A standard RMAN backup set contains one or more backup pieces, and each of these pieces consists of the data blocks for a particular datafile stored in a special compressed format. When a datafile needs to be restored, therefore, the entire datafile essentially needs to be recreated from the blocks present in the backup piece.
An image copy of a datafile, on the other hand, is much faster to restore because the physical structure of the datafile already exists. Oracle 10g now permits image copies to be created at the database, tablespace, or datafile level through the new RMAN directive BACKUP AS COPY. For example, here is a command script to create image copies for all datafiles in the entire database:

RUN {
# Set the default channel configuration. Note the use of the 
# %U directive to insure unique file names for the image copies
ALLOCATE CHANNEL dbkp1 DEVICE TYPE DISK FORMAT 'c:\oracle\rmanbkup\U%';

# Create an image copy of all datafiles in the database
BACKUP AS COPY DATABASE;
}