Category: Backups

Aug 27

How to Backup RAC VM’s

Many of us now have Oracle RAC installed in virtual environments on our laptops and workstations. This blog post shows how I did just that on my MacBook Pro. Recently, I was re-installing a new RAC testbed on my laptop when I ran into a few issues that took me awhile to sort out. After …

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Jan 22

SQL Server Outage

Just like many Oracle DBA’s, I have to support other database platforms as well, which in my case does include SQL Server. My shop has regularly scheduled maintenance windows every Wednesday evening. Last night, our SysAdmins were replacing some disk in our production SQL Server box. The disk wasn’t one that SQL Server uses so …

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Oct 01

Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance

Oracle’s standby databases have been around for a long time now. The primary ships redo to the standby to keep them in sync. It seems to be a natural fit that Oracle has now extended this concept to a backup and recovery appliance. The idea is that you take one backup of your database at …

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Aug 14

Reconstruct Standby DB

After a recent power outage at our DR site, I discovered that a standby there had stopped applying logs. Apparently in the archived redo logs was a transaction which grew a datafile but the disk at the standby site did not have enough disk space to allow that transaction to complete. So the standby terminated …

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May 14

Recovery Requirements Before Backups

All too often, I see people asking questions about backup strategies they should employ for their databases. It never seems to fail, every question of this sort that I have come across in a variety of forums never once includes their recovery requirements. I have often stumped for considering your recovery requirements before designing your …

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