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Review: Oracle Database 12c
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Riyaj Shamsudeen offers an in-depth look at Oracle Database 12c, which he calls a 'true cloud database,' bringing a new level of efficiency and ease to database consolidation. 'In development for roughly four years, Oracle Database 12c introduces so many important new capabilities in so many areas — database consolidation, query optimization, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup and recovery — that even a lengthy review has to cut corners. Nevertheless, in addition to covering the big ticket items, I'll give a number of the lesser enhancements their due,' writes Riyaj Shamsudeen. 'Having worked with the beta for many months, I can tell you that the quality of software is also impressive, starting with a smooth RAC cluster installation. As with any new software release, I did encounter a few minor bugs. Hopefully these have been resolved in the production release that arrived yesterday.'"
I didn't read that from TFA - just that object level restores have been improved, as has some compression features.
Just so everybody is aware Oracle has always had kick-ass restore and recovery features, way ahead of other database - such things as Flashback, it has been shipping transaction logs since Noah was a boy, and the good ol' "ALERT TABLESPACE BEGIN BACKUP" to allow you to copy files online. It can perform change block tracking on database datafiles to allow increment backups "ALTER DATABASE ENABLE BLOCK CHANGE TRACKING USING FILE ;". All of this is platform independent too.
Recovery is also awesome. "ALTER DATABASE RECOVER UNTIL [timestamp]", "ALTER DATABASE RECOVERY UNTIL CANCEL", "ALTER DATABASE UNTIL CHANGE [transaction number]" and so on. If you accidentally loose you control files (somewhat like your MS-SQL master database being trashed) you can recreate them using SQL.
The big problem is that you have to be doing a lot of it to be good at it, many very think books have been written on Oracle backup and restore. So tools like Oracle's RMAN have been created to manage the process for DBAs...
It's free for personal use (edelivery.oracle.com) just like all Oracle software. You only need paid licenses and support for commercial use. For that you need a lot of money.
mysqldump can and will lock tables during its backup - there's some tricks around this; but on a big production database, its really suboptimal.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
I see you're a dedicated full-time Oracle support guy. I don't know of a lot of other products that require a full-time support person to do (conceptually) simple stuff. My biggest complaint about Oracle has always been that to even take it out of the box and install it required guru-level Oracle knowledge, much less keeping it running well. I absolutely hate all things Microsoft, but at least you can install Squeel Server and set up backups without two days effort and an overwhelming desire to stick a gun in your mouth.
one of the selling points of sql server and oracle is you can backup the database directly while its running. you can backup the database, by separate files and file groups
SQL server you can even have the database online during a restore. you restore the main file group and then the others. all the data may not be there, but the database will be able to server applications with some data. you can always move your tables around so that the most important ones get restored first
with SQL server on decent hardware from the last 2-3 years you can backup a database during business hours and your users will never know. i do it all the time
No, it's $200/year for a personal licence if you're going to use it commercially. If you're just creating a DB to categorize the porn on your PC and don't ever plan on making money or exposing it in a commercial sense it's free to use.