Introduction

So like every good Oracle DBA, you’ve created a few databases, decided that if they were worth creating and using they might also be worth backing up, and created some backup scripts that do ample logging. All hunky dory, right? You shouldn’t need to revisit this, right?

WRONG!!!

Allow me to present the snapshot of a day from the life of John--the DBA at Acme Bank. On this particular day a database John manages crashed entirely and had to be restored from the backup. He takes regular (backupset) RMAN backups to tape. Since everything--including the controlfile--had crashed, John had to first restore the controlfile and then restore the database. The controlfile is always backed up with the backup database command. John was sure of that. However, restore controlfile from autobackup gave the error:

RMAN-06172: no AUTOBACKUP found or specified handle is not a valid copy or piece

Without the controlfile, the recovery was stuck, even though all the valid pieces were there. It was a rather alarming situation. Others would have panicked; but not John. As always, he managed to resolve the situation by completing recovery. Interested to learn how? Read on.

In a previous post, I had already listed an article on backup and recovery when using the Oracle 12c multitentant option.

• Multitenant : Backup and Recovery of a Container Database (CDB) and a Pluggable Database (PDB)

In that article I made reference to a restriction when using flashback database against a CDB with a PDB that has had a point in time recovery. I finally got my head round this and posted a note about it here.

I’ve been rather critical of the way Cloud Control handles database backup jobs, as can be seen in these two previous posts.

• I love Cloud Control 12c, but the job management is really annoying!
• Oracle Cloud Control EMCLI : First Thoughts

Yesterday I found out I schedule database backups in Cloud Control the “wrong way”…

So typically, when I am sorting out a new database, I do something like this:

At last week’s Dallas Oracle Users Group meeting, an Oracle DBA asked me, “With all the new database alternatives out there today, like all these open source NoSQL databases, would you recommend for us to learn some of those?”

I told him I had a theory about how these got so popular and that I wanted to share that before I answered his question.

My theory is this. Developers perceive Oracle as being too costly, time-consuming, and complex:

I wrote this article as a foreword for the 2007 Apress book “RMAN Recipes for Oracle Database 11g: A Problem-Solution Approach” by Darl Kuhn, Sam Alapati, and Arup Nanda (ISBN 1590598512), and I’m pleased to learn it will be included in the exciting new Apress update “RMAN Recipes for Oracle Database 12c: A Problem-Solution Approach” (ISBN 143024836X), scheduled for 14-Aug 2013 publication, assuming that Oracle Database 12c^H^H^HNextGeneration is released prior to then…

So this is a 2 node RAC cluster on RHEL that was recently upgraded from 10.2.0.2 to 10.2.0.4. Since then clusterware restarts crs every few hours (8 in fact). A little research suggests that this can indicate problems with the automated OCR backup.  The first thing therefore is to check the state of the backups. [server] [...]