The Oracle Agent provides unified protection and recovery for Oracle databases that reside on a File System ASM or raw device on Windows or UNIX clients.
It also provides granular backup and recovery options that operate seamlessly with your data protection needs.
Key Features
Backup and Recovery Options
You can back up Oracle databases, the control file, log files, the server parameter file, or Oracle datafiles and tablespaces. You can back up the database when it is online or offline.
In configurations where there is no RMAN catalog, you can use the Oracle control file.
You can run the following types of backup operation:
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Full Backups: Oracle full backups include the entire database and the control file. A full backup is the most comprehensive backup and is the baseline for incremental backups. Full backups of online databases include the log files. An offline full backup is a cold backup for Oracle databases.
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Incremental Backups: An Oracle incremental backup contains the changed data from the last full backup. Incremental backups use less media and resources than full backups.
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Selective Online Full Backups: A selective online full backup is a backup taken when the database is online. The backed up data is copied to a selective copy, which you can use for a restore. This backup is useful in disaster recovery scenarios because the data and logs are stored together.
Backup and Recovery Failovers
In the event that the MediaAgent used for the backup or recovery operation fails, the backup is automatically resumed on an alternate MediaAgents. In such cases, the backup or restore job does not restart from the beginning, but resumes from the point of failure. This is useful for backups and restores of large amount of file system data.
In the event that a network goes down, the backup and recovery jobs are resumed on alternate data paths. Similarly, in the event of a device failure, the jobs are automatically switched to alternate disk and tape drives.
Efficient Job Management and Reporting
You can view and verify the status of backup and recovery operations from the Job Controller and the Event Viewer within the CommCell Console. You can also track the status of the jobs using Reports, which can be saved and distributed. Generate reports for different aspects of data management. Customize the reports to display only the required data and save them to a specific location in different formats. For example, you can create a backup job summary report to view the completed backup jobs.
You can schedule, generate and send the Reports via email without user intervention.
Block-Level Deduplication
Deduplication provides a smarter way to store data by identifying and eliminating the duplicate items in a data protection operation.
Deduplication at the data block-level compares blocks of data against each other. If an object (such as, file, database) contains blocks of data that are identical to each other, then block-level deduplication does not store the redundant data, which reduces the size of the object in storage. This reduces the size of the backup data copies on both the disk and tapes.
Automatic Discovery of Applications
You can use the Auto discover applications option to automatically find Oracle databases in your environment and install software to back up the Oracle databases. For more information, see Automatic Discovery of Applications.