Oracle backup and recovery : What you need to know

After a few years working as an Oracle DBA I feel excited today to share one of the most important fruit of my DBA experience with you : The Backup and Recovery.
Ask any oracle DBA about his daily life.
Ask him what are must critical things about DBA.
Ask him what is must common task he used to do.

A daily life of a DBA is all about fun, when the database is stable and running smoothly.

About the critical task of a DBA, installing the database form scratch to be used for production.  If you have setup one you will certainly feel what I mean...fun!!!

About the must important and common task done by a DBA: Backup and recovery. 
Luckily Oracle offer you many backup and recovery techniques to choose from.The head ache common first from choosing the right techniques that will not let you down when problems will come out. Boss Phone Call ... fun !!!
Here are a brief summary of some backup techniques:

•     Export/Import - Exports are "logical" database backups in that they extract logical definitions and data from the database to a file. See the Import/ Export FAQ for more details.

•     Cold or Off-line Backups - shut the database down and backup up ALL data, log, and control files.

•     Hot or On-line Backups - If the database is available and in ARCHIVELOG mode, set the tablespaces into backup mode and backup their files. Also remember to backup the control files and archived redo log files.

•    RMAN Backups - while the database is off-line or on-line, use the "rman" utility to backup the database. 

Among them the RMAN backup appears incontestably as the best option, it is the lastest and also highly recommended by Oracle.

Why should you consider RMAN instead of others ?

Some advantages of using RMAN:

1.  Supports incremental backup strategies
2. Keeps invenotory of taken backups
3. RMAN automatically track database structure changes
4. Provides easy, automated backup, restore and recovery operations
5. RMAN can detect corrupted blocks
6. RMAN on-line backups are not so heavy for the system as manual on-line backups
7. Can seamlessly work with third party media managers:

•  EMC NetWorker
•  Tivoli Storage Manager
•  Veritas NetBackup

Some disadvantages of using RMAN:

1.    RMAN concepts and command syntax sometimes are not intuitive
2.   Something new to learn
3.  Fears of using a new tool...

I am stopping here for today, but on my next post I will try to discuss on how to easily perform the backup/recovery in few steps.