Oracle Database 12c Backup and Recovery Survival Guide, written by Francisco Munoz Alvarez and Aman Sharma, is published by Packt. I’m one of the technical editors of the book and I can say that it’s well-written, easy-to-read, and covers all important topics about backup and recovery and provides the best practices.
Francisco Munoz Alvarez has over two decades of experience in consulting, support, implementation, and migration of Oracle products and he’s an Oracle ACE Director. Aman Sharma is an Oracle ACE, consultant and instructor. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Applications and has been working with Oracle Database for over a decade.
List of chapters:
- Understanding the Basics of Backup and Recovery: First chapter introduces backup and recovery concepts, explains why we need backups and the common problems such media failure, hardware failure, human error.
- NOLOGGING Operations: This is one of my favorite chapters because nologging is less-known subject, and the authors really did a great job to explain it, and how it affects recovery.
- What is New in 12c: New features of Oracle 12c related with backup and recovery, and the new multi-tenant architecture are explained in this chapter.
- User-managed Backup and Recovery: This chapter shows various methods to backup: cold backup, offline backup, hot backups.
- Understanding RMAN and Simple Backups: RMAN architecture, target database and target control file concepts, RMAN channels, Auxiliary database are explained in this chapter. This chapter also explains backup sets and image copies, and explains how to take full and incremental backups
- Configuring and Recovering with RMAN: This chapter shows how to configure your database for backup and recovery. Various recovery scenarios are shown including recovering whole CDBs, PDBs, and root container databases
- RMAN Reporting and Catalog Management: RMAN recovery catalog and how we can query it using LIST and REPORT commands are mentioned in this chapter.
- RMAN Troubleshooting and Tuning: This chapter explains how to debug or monitor RMAN operations and how we can tune the backups. It’s a very important chapter with lots of useful information.
- Understanding Data Pump: The Data Pump architecture, related technologies such as Direct path and Conventional path access, and basic usage examples of data pump (to move the data) can be found in this chapter.
- Advanced Data Pump: This chapter explains more advanced usage of data pump such as creating smaller copies of production, downgrading an Oracle Database, transporting tablespaces.
- OEM12c and SQL Developer: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control and SQL Developer have been started to widely used by DBAs. This chapter shows how we can manage, and monitor RMAN backups using OEM12c and SQL Developer.
The appendix of the book, is a like a cheatsheet for backup and recovery. You can find list of commands for sample scenarios. I’m sure, it would be a useful reference book to all Oracle DBAs. You can order the book from Packt Publishing website.