Backup Strategies using OEM Enterprise Manager

 By Porus Homi Havewala

Executing a full database backup every night is fine for small or medium sized databases and no one complains about the small amount of disk space the back up requires or why the backup executes in a very short time.

However, when the database size is more than say 200 GB, it is time to rethink your backup strategy. In most of the real world database scenarios, having a proper and validated backup strategy is very important – even for small databases.  And regular testing of your RMAN backup of all your databases is one of the DBA’s mandatory responsibilities.

Consider a larger database with 500 GB in total of database files. Obviously it will not be appropriate to take a full database backup each day. You can adopt a better backup strategy by taking a full database backup once a week on a Sunday and then an incremental database backup Monday through Saturday. This will enable you to recover the database to any point in time during the previous week by first restoring Sunday’s full database backup and then applying the appropriate incremental backups.

For the detailed steps on how to set this up in Enterprise Manager, please refer to the book, which also examines how to take database backups using snapshots on NetApp Filers. Full scripts are supplied.