Database Recovery Best Practices

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed using Oracle Data Guard as the best practice to achieve high availability and protection from planned and unplanned failures. If media failures occur on the Database Machine and you do not have a Data Guard configuration, you have no choice but to recover the database using backups.

Oracle RMAN is the only tool that can recover databases residing on the Exadata Storage Servers. RMAN makes the recovery process simple by using just two commands, restore database and recover database. When you run these commands, RMAN will search its catalog and retrieve the list of backups needed to perform recovery, along with their respective locations. RMAN will then restore all the required backups and perform further media recovery that might be required to complete the recovery process.