NetVault Plug-in for Oracle 12.2 - User Guide

Using the plug-in with Oracle Data Guard

Oracle Data Guard: an overview

Oracle’s Oracle Data Guard “ensures high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for enterprise data. Data Guard provides a comprehensive set of services that create, maintain, manage, and monitor one or more standby databases to enable production Oracle databases to survive disasters and data corruptions. Data Guard maintains these standby databases as copies of the production database. If the production database becomes unavailable because of an outage, Data Guard can switch any standby database to the production role, minimizing the downtime associated with the outage. Data Guard can be used with traditional backup, restoration, and cluster techniques to provide a high level of data protection and data availability.”

With Data Guard, administrators can optionally improve production database performance by offloading resource-intensive backup and reporting operations to Standby Database Servers. In addition, backups can be used to recover either the Primary or Standby Database Server, regardless of whether the backups were taken from the Primary or the Standby Database Server.

Plug‑in for Oracle provides support for a limited number of Oracle versions in a Data Guard environment. The installation, configuration, backup, and restore procedures differ slightly in a Data Guard environment. This topic offers specifics on how the plug-in operates in a Data Guard environment.

For a complete list of supported Oracle versions and platforms in a Data Guard environment, see the Quest NetVault Backup Compatibility Guide.

NOTE: The plug-in’s RMAN backup method is the only method supported in Data Guard environments. Unless outlined in the following topics, backups and restores performed with the plug-in for Data Guard physical or standby databases are the same as backups and restores performed with non-Data Guard databases.

Defining a deployment strategy

Determining a strategy for protecting and recovering a Data Guard environment is essential to deploying and using the plug-in in the Data Guard environment. All strategies are valid for any of the supported deployments as detailed in Deployment.

Back up from Primary only

The simplest strategy is to perform all the backups from the Primary Database Server. You can use these backups to recover the Primary or one of the Standby Database Servers. While this strategy is valid, resource-intensive backup operations affect database performance on the Primary Database Server. With this strategy, the plug-in is installed on the Primary Database Server. Plug‑in for Oracle is only required to be installed on the Standby Database Server when it is targeted for a restore.