16.5. FlashbackOracle 10g introduced a wonderful set of features collectively referred to as flashback. Some use the flash recovery area that was discussed in the architecture section, and others use the new recycle bin or the undo tablespace. Where physical backups (the focus of this chapter) are mainly designed to recover from equipment and disk failures, flashback offers a number of interesting ways to recover from human error. Here is a quick summary of these features. Be sure to consult your documentation on how to use flashback.
16.5.1. Other Commercial Backup MethodsThere is at least one commercial backup tool that backs up Oracle databases without using rman. It uses the same tools your scripts would use (e.g., begin backup/end backup), so it suffers many of the same limitations that such scripts would have. One such product is BMC's SQL Backtrack. Originally designed for Sybase, this product has been ported to Oracle, Informix, and SQL Server. At this writing, SQL Backtrack does not do volume management. It can, however, interface with some commercial storage managers, allowing them to provide volume management. |