If you are part of a large enterprise, chances are high that you have Oracle database servers in your production environment. If you are an Oracle DBA, you would be entrusted with ensuring that data integrity and availability is maintained all the times. That means you’d have to make sure that if there are any data corruptions/deletions you need to find a way to get back to a consistent state in order to minimize business revenue loss.
Here are some of the challenges that Oracle DBAs might face on a daily basis:
- Meeting recovery SLAs: Backups with 24 hour RPO would mean that there would be a fewer point in time copies to recover from, thereby increasing the chances of data loss. Recovering from a backup leads to high RTO i.e. it would take more time to complete restores, thereby increasing downtime.
- Impact of backups on production performance: Most traditional tools that protect Oracle databases rely on periodic full backups. A full backup increases backup window, CPU, memory and networking utilization, thus impacting production database performance.
- Dealing with Long-term Storage Complexity: The size of a database, change rate, retention, dedupe-ability, and growth of data determines how much storage is needed for backup retentions. As those factors change over time, the storage capacity and performance management become a nightmare.
- Management Complexity: Managing multiple database instances and versions in multiple locations such as on-premises and public cloud like AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle cloud is a big challenge. In addition, delivering a consistent set of SLAs for RTO, RPO, and retention at all locations is a challenge.
- Budget: As IT budgets are shrinking, a lot of organizations are looking towards the public cloud. The cloud object storage is cheaper with no upfront costs, and cloud computing can be used for on-demand recoveries. But, a lift and shift approach with traditional backup vendors to cloud increases cloud infrastructure costs with poor SLAs.
If you want to resolve these challenges, you need to evaluate various Oracle backup & recovery solutions for their key features and capabilities.
Free Checklist: Oracle Backup and Recovery Solution Critical Capabilities