Performing Oracle Advanced Recovery - OCP: Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certified Professional - page 310

Oracle Data Pump, Oracle GoldenGate
and Oracle Data Guard
Oracle Data Pump is a logical backup and restore solution provided by Oracle. This solution
is typically slower than using an RMAN solution. Before cross-platform movement of data
via RMAN was possible, Oracle Data Pump was the only option. Now, it is perhaps the last
option as the speed of Data Pump is usually much slower than RMAN. Also, RMAN pre-
serves much more of the meta structure of the underlying database than Oracle Data Pump.
This might not be important in most cases, but there can be those cases where this might be
important.
Oracle provides other tools such as Data Guard and GoldenGate that provide the ability
to instantiate the remote database on the other host, and keep it in synch with the original
database. This will allow you to move the database and then test it before actually opening
it up to the world. Additionally, the time required to switch over to the new database host is
substantially reduced.
Complete Disaster
So what happens if there is a complete disaster and you lose everything? You need to plan
for such an event. Taking backups and moving them offsite is the first step. You need to
make sure not only that you have backups of your database offsite but that you have copies
of the Oracle software available offsite too. Any parameter files that are not backed up by
RMAN (say, your tnsnames.ora or your listener.ora files) should be backed up offsite.
We thought we would close this section of the chapter with a review of what you would
need to do if you had to recover from offsite backups following a disaster. If you are using
RMAN and you find you need to do a complete database recovery, you would follow the
steps listed here. Chapter 5 provides more detail on the individual RMAN recovery steps
and how to execute them:
1. Restore the OS.
2. Restore the Oracle software.
3. Configure Oracle networking.
4. Ensure that you have access to the RMAN backup set pieces that you need.
5. Restore the database spfile from the control-file autobackup. We assume that if you
are doing control-file autobackups to disk, you will move those backups to tape and
offsite them.
6. Once the database spfile is restored, you can mount the database and restore the control
files of the database from the autobackups.
7. Once the database control file is restored, you can begin the restore and recovery of the
database proper.