Most Fortune 1000 enterprises spend millions of dollars on infrastructure to run mission-critical Oracle databases. For any performance glitches, you put everything under a microscope: compute, storage, database queries, database layout, indexes, triggers, locks, archive log space, etc. Invariably a DBA is at the hub of the troubleshooting and root-cause analysis.
DBAs often enjoy problem-solving that comes with database optimization; however, they can live without the extreme pressure that comes from management in these situations. The following three problems typically exacerbate these problems:
- Impact of Downtime: The #1 fear is the production database going down because of infrastructure failure, or an incorrect rollout of a new patch or schema. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is; the DBA is in the eye of the storm when a database outage happens.
- Impact of FULL Backups: The #2 challenge is the impact of full backups on production database performance. Imagine a 10 TB database with 5% change rate per day. Even though only 500GB changes, a full backup copies the entire 10 TB. That’s a significant impact on the production database not to mention the impact on network bandwidth.
- Impact of Cloning: The #3 challenge is the continuous stream of requests from Dev, QA, UAT folks to create copies of production databases. A large number of clones or faster refresh cycles increases the burden on DBAs.
The larger the databases, the more extreme these challenges. Every DBA wants a data management tool that can solve these challenges.
So how do you evaluate various tools for backup, recovery, and cloning?
A checklist with all the critical capabilities requirements that would enable you to assess the variety of capabilities available, and we have created just the document for you. The document summarizes critical capabilities for Oracle backup, recovery and cloning anywhere in the data center or public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and IBM.