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Oracle DBA Backup and Recovery Quick Reference (Prentice Hall PTR Oracle Series)

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If you are an Oracle database administrator and you have a background as a unix or Microsoft sysadmin, then you might wonder why there is a need for an ENTIRE book on backup of Oracle's database. It is not that you doubt the need for a backup. But a whole book? In unix, you do a "man" on the backup command and you are shown a few screens of options. Likewise for restoring. Under Microsoft, a similar situation prevails. But unix and Microsoft are general purpose operating systems. An operating system is basically about file manipulation. In essence, a file is the atomic unit to the OS. So the backup and restore options are limited to the richness of this information.

But Oracle's database is a specialised and elaborate "operating system". The data is constrained and structured far more than files in a real OS. A backup can take advantage of this by offering hugely more options to you; a far more expressive set of commands to do a fine grained backup of fairly arbitrary subsets of the data. And of course, also with the restore.

This increased power comes at a price. Remembering all those darned options, especially the obscure, rarely invoked ones. Hence this book. Its value is strictly as a memory aid. You have to already understand what those options do, from Oracle's official documentation. The book uses a common flow chart style graph for the options, for easier use.