Oracle Database 12c Backup and Recovery Survival Guide A comprehensive guide for every DBA to learn recovery and backup solutions Francisco Munoz Alvarez Aman Sharma BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI Oracle Database 12c Backup and Recovery Survival Guide Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: September 2013 Production Reference: 1170913 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK. ISBN 978-1-78217-120-1 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Dilleshwar ([email protected]) Credits Authors Project Coordinator Francisco Munoz Alvarez Wendell Palmer Aman Sharma Proofreader Ameesha Green Reviewers Gokhan Atil Wissem EL Khlifi Indexers Rekha Nair Bjorn Naessens Tejal Soni Arup Nanda Alessandro Parisi Graphics Laurent Schneider Abhinash Sahu Ronak Dhruv Acquisition Editor Vinay Argekar Production Coordinator Shantanu Zagade Lead Technical Editor Azharuddin Sheikh Cover Work Shantanu Zagade Technical Editors Manan Badani Aparna Chand Vivek Pillai About the Author Francisco Munoz Alvarez has over two decades of experience in consulting, analysis, support, implementation, and migration of Oracle products. He is also an expert in most phases of a database life cycle, for example, development, stabilization, security, backup and recovery, tuning, installations, and data warehouse (ETL) with excellent implementation and support methodologies. He is a popular speaker at many Oracle conferences around the world. He is also the President of CLOUG (Chilean Oracle Users Group), LAOUC (Latin American Oracle Users Group Community, which is the umbrella organization for all of Latin America), and NZOUG (New Zealand Oracle Users Group). He worked as an Associate Technologist for Oracle in Brazil and Chile. He was an Oracle instructor for the New Horizons Centre (Chile) and for Oracle Education (Brazil and Chile). He also worked in the first team to introduce Oracle to South America (Oracle 6 and the beta version of Oracle 7). He was also the first Master Oracle 7 Database Administrator in South America, as well as the first Latin American Oracle professional to be awarded a double ACE (ACE in 2008 and ACE Director in 2009) by Oracle HQ. In 2010, he had the privilege to receive a prestigious Oracle Magazine Editor's Choice Award as the Oracle Evangelist of the Year—a huge recognition for his outstanding achievements in the Oracle world that includes the creation and organization of the already famous OTN Tours that are the biggest Oracle evangelist events in the world. Currently, Francisco works for Revera Limited, which is a leading provider of utility computing infrastructure and enterprise data management in New Zealand, as the Oracle Professional Services Manager since June 2011. He also maintains an Oracle blog (http://www.oraclenz.org) and you can always contact him through this or Twitter (@fcomunoz) regarding any questions about this book. Acknowledgement Writing a book is not the accomplishment of one or two people, it involves a huge group of people behind the scenes to make it possible. Due to this, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge some important people in my life that without their support and help, writing this book would have been an impossible journey. I would like to start with my wonderful wife, mother of my four wonderful children; honey, without your enormous patience and support, nothing could be possible—even though at times you don't understand this fascinating journey and this fascinating world, my love, I dedicate this book to you! Secondly, my mother, my father and my well-remembered grandmother for everything you all taught me in my early years and the things I have seen because of you. And finally my good friends, Thomas Kyte, Arup Nanda, Aman Sharma (your support, help, and friendship is invaluable), Gokhan Atil, Wissem EL Khifi, Bjorn Naessens, Alessandro Parisi, Laurent Schneider, all editors, and everyone involved in the book, without your help and support throughout writing this book and even during my career, I would never have been able to finish writing this book. About the Author Aman Sharma is an Oracle Database consultant and instructor. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Applications and has been working with Oracle Database for over a decade. His main focus is to understand how Oracle Database works internally. Besides the core database, he has a very strong knowledge of Linux, Solaris, Oracle RAC, Data Guard, RMAN, Oracle Exadata and Oracle Enterprise Manager. He is an Oracle Certified Professional and also an Oracle Certified Expert in Oracle RAC, SQL and Linux. He is also an Oracle Certified Implementation Specialist and a certified Solaris System Administrator. He loves to share his learning with the Oracle community, so when he is not delivering an Oracle related session, he spends a lot of his time participating in OTN (Oracle Technology Network) discussion forums. He also maintains an Oracle blog (http://blog.aristadba.com), is also on Twitter (@amansharma81), you can reach to him using either ways. He is a strong supporter of user groups and is a member of India Oracle Users Group (http://www.aioug.org) and has been a speaker at various Oracle conferences organized by AIOUG. He is also an associate member of IOUG (http://www.ioug.org). In 2010, he was awarded the prestigious Oracle ACE award from Oracle Corporation. Acknowledgement I dedicate this book to my entire family for their so much love, affection, and constant encouragement. A child is just like a plain canvas. It's his parents who fill colors into it with their love, blessings, guidance, and teachings. The same is true for me as well. This book is a result of the blessings, love, affection, guidance, and support of my mom and dad. Thank you so very much mom and dad! Dad, how so I wish that you were here today, but I know you are watching over me from the heavens, your blessings are always with me and you must be very happy today! We all miss you so very much—every day, in every moment! Writing a book is a team effort and requires a lot of hard work but every journey starts from that very first step. For me, getting aboard to work on this book became possible only because of my dear friend and co-author Francisco Munoz Alvarez, who invited me to become a co-author with him. It was a really great team effort and working with him was an absolute delight, as well as a very learning and rewarding experience. I thank him for not only making me a part of this project but also for his support, help and mentoring the entire time while we were working on this project. Though a book is written by its authors, there are many other people who work behind the scenes and do tons of things that finally result in letting a book see the sunshine. The most important among these are the technical reviewers who do the painful job of reading the raw writing of an author, line by line and correct it. It's due to their corrections, suggestions, feedback, and questions that convert those sentences written in a Word document into the chapters of an actual book. I am so very thankful to our most excellent team of the technical reviewers which we got: Arup Nanda, Wissem EL Khlifi, Gokhan Atil, Bjorn Naessens, Laurent Schneider, and Alessandro Parisi. Without their input, feedback and corrections, it wouldn't have been possible to find out what was missing, what needed to be removed, which topics required more explanation, and above all, to spot the technical errors and correct them. So when you would be reading about a topic in any chapter and would like it, remember that a major contribution to it has come in some way or the other from the technical excellence and input given by the reviewers. I also want to say a big thanks to the entire team at Packt who did a splendid job in every aspect of the book, especially to my editor Vinay Argekar, and Wendell Palmer, the coordinator for the entire project, for being so supportive in this entire journey. Thanks to our Lead Technical Editor Azharuddin Sheikh along with his entire team: Manan Badani, Aparna Chand, and Vivek Pillai. They all have spent a lot of time ironing out the final wrinkles from the chapters, giving them that marvellous polished look which you will see throughout. I also want to pass on my gratitude to all those people with whom I might have not interacted directly but who worked very hard behind the scenes to bring this book into your hands. I would like to take this opportunity to say thanks to all those people in the Oracle community who were not involved in this project but who are always an inspiration and constantly motivated me—not only to correct and improve myself by learning as much as possible, but also to share that learning with others and help them. The list is far too long and I am going to miss more than I will be able to put here but still, to name a few (and in no particular order): Jonathan Lewis, Hans Forbrich, Dan Morgan, Hemant Chitale, Sam Alapati, Eddie Awad, Uwe Hesse, Syed Jaffar Hussain, Kellyn Pot'Vin, Tim Gorman, Steve Adams, Kyle Hailey, Tim Hall, Mark Bobak, Cary Millsap, Howard Rodgers, Steve Karam, Tanel Poder, Alex Gorbachev, Kai Yu, Riaz Shamsudeen, Murali Vallath, Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha, Rama Velpuri, and so many more as the list goes on and on and on. Many thanks to all of you! Thanks to my friend Kamran Agayev for giving me the very first writing opportunity by inviting me to be his co-author and Don Burelson, and entire team of Rampant Press for their support in the entire time of writing it. Thanks to Zahida Praveen who gave me the first opportunity to step in and prove myself in the real world. I also wish to express my gratitude and thanks to all my superordinates for their constant support and motivation: Arvind Dikshit, Gautham Malareddy, Usha George, Joann Too, Ajai Sahni, Shantnu Tandan, Latha Gangadharan, Kalyan Chakravarthy, and Ritesh Jain. I would like to offer my gratitude to all the delegates that I get to meet in person and to those whom I interact with virtually over the OTN forums, for asking their questions and doubts. It's your questions which make me learn (and many times, even re-learn) new things every single day. Finally, thanks a ton to you for making this book a part of your library. I really hope and wish that you are going to like the book and it's going to be useful for you in some way. About the Reviewers Gokhan Atil is a Senior Applications DBA working at one of the leading IT consultancy companies in Turkey. He has a strong background in UNIX systems and hands-on experience in Oracle Database versions 11g/10g/9i/8i and Oracle E-Business Suite R12/11i. He is an active member of the Oracle community and a founding member of the Turkish Oracle User Group (TROUG). He has written and presented papers at various conferences. He's one of the co-authors of the book Expert Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, published in 2013. Gokhan Atil holds various Oracle certifications such as Oracle Database 10g/11g Administrator Certified Professional, Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Applications DBA Certified Professional, and Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3 Administrator Certified Expert. He was honored with the Oracle ACE award in 2011. He has a blog where he shares his experiences with Oracle since 2008. You can get in touch with Gokhan at http://www.gokhanatil.com. Wissem El Khlifi is the first Oracle ACE in Spain and an Oracle Certified Professional DBA with over 12 years of IT experience. He earned a Computer Science Engineer's degree from FST, Tunisia, and a Master's in Computer Science from the UPC, Barcelona. His areas of interest are Linux System Administration, Oracle Database including high availability (RAC, Dataguard), and Oracle applications. He has worked with Oracle Database since version 7. His career has included the roles of Oracle programmer, Java analyst/programmer, Oracle DBA, architect, project manager, and team leader. He currently works as the Senior Oracle DBA for Schneider Electric/APC. He writes numerous articles on his Oracle website: http://www.oracle-class.com.