Disaster Recovery – Data Guard + RMAN

DSP ensures disasters are prevented before they need to be recovered

DSP is able to advise on installation and upgrade paths including complimentary technology and processes that can help create a Disaster Recovery solution, including Data Guard and effective back ups using Recovery Manager (RMAN).  This can be applied to both the Oracle technology stack and also configured to E-business suite.

Data Disaster Recovery (DDR)
DDR is central to many organisations corporate governance plans - Once a complete DDR overview has been undertaken to identified whether Data Guard will provide the required level of protection within the Oracle environment, DSP will advise on the process or technology that will be needed to be implemented so that risk is removed or reduced significantly.

Data Guard
Oracle Data Guard is the management, monitoring, and automation software infrastructure that creates, maintains, and monitors one or more standby databases to protect enterprise data from failures, disasters, errors, and corruptions.

Data Guard maintains these standby databases as synchronized copies of the production database. These standby databases can be located at remote disaster recovery sites thousands of miles away from the production data centre, or they may be located in the same city, same campus, or even in the same building. If the production database becomes unavailable because of a planned or an unplanned outage, Data Guard can switch any standby database to the production role, thus minimising the downtime associated with the outage, and preventing any data loss.

Data Guard has been designed to protect any data contained within the Oracle database and from within tables from been corrupted or lost due to an outage or unplanned occurrence.

RMAN - Recovery Manager
RMAN handles backup and recovery operations. RMAN can be instructed to make backups, perform restores, and complete recoveries in a flexible, efficient and intelligent manner. It has been part of the Oracle standard tool kit since Oracle 8.0.

The smallest structure in a database is a data block. Datafiles, redo log files and control files are made of data of blocks. RMAN is data block centric in its activity, it reads data blocks and copies them to a backup location. During recovery RMAN reads the database block copies from the backup location. Although RMAN can make datafile copies it is its ability to work with blocks that make’s it so useful.

RMAN will take care of much of the work for you in protecting the database(s). What used to be involved and exacting can now be achieved with a few RMAN commands. RMAN can be invoked as a command line utility or in a GUI mode via the enterprise manager. RMAN automates many of the backup and recovery tasks that were formally performed manually.

DBA’s have a lot of work to do however the Number one question a DBA should ask himself or herself is: Can I recover the database in the event of a failure be it hardware, software or human error?


For a free assessment of how Data Guard can help your organisation please contact DSP - We can book you in for a half day assessment.

 DSP is an Oracle Certified Partner for both Software Licenses, Technology and Applications