In Veeam Availability Suite v10, it’s easy to miss some of the potentially smaller topics that are in fact a really big deal. If you haven’t read the What’s New document for v10, you should, as I’m sure you’ll find some goodies that you can immediately enjoy. Some of those are the enhancements to enterprise applications. Oracle support with Veeam has taken a big step forward with v10. Now users have the ability to publish databases instantly from a backup to a point-in-time state.
This is a very important recovery technique when it comes to quickly gaining access to a database as an instant publish (versus restoring the entire database in a traditional restore when fresh data is needed for test and development purposes). The publish database capability is faster because it runs the database directly from the backup file. This is an amazing opportunity when performing test or development use cases on data that was current just as recent as the last backup (aka fresh data). Consider safely analyzing yesterday’s data from yesterday’s backup for changes and potential data manipulation — all without impacting or changing your live production Oracle database. This is a good opportunity to highlight the difference between a publish and a traditional restore of an Oracle database:
Publish
Will present the Oracle database running directly from the backup file to the target Oracle server for test and development use cases on fresh data. Then it can be exported or discarded with no impact on the backup.
Restore
Will read the backup data and build a new database on the target Oracle server as a complete restore task. This commonly takes as long as the backup to complete.
Like everything else in Veeam, the product is extremely simple to use and to achieve these advanced restore scenarios — even if you are not an Oracle DBA or expert. From Veeam Explorer for Oracle, you can launch the new publish task easily as shown below:
The powerful part of publishing an Oracle database instantly is you can specify the point-in-time position of the database that will give you great control and simplicity in choosing the dataset that best meets your needs:
The final step of the publish wizard is to specify what transaction will be in the database that is published. In the example below, the database published will be right before the object called “TEMPORARY” is being created:
And just like that, the database from that point in time will be published for test or development work. This is an important additional recovery technique that can keep your production data safe, and at the same time, not impact the integrity of the backup data.
Aside from the new publishing point-in-time states of Oracle databases, Veeam Explorer for Oracle has additional capabilities that will give incredible new options for data recovery as well:
- Database export to a native RMAN file
- Redirect RMAN restores to different servers
- New RESETLOGS options, no sudo requirements for RMAN backups, and more
You can find more technical information about Veeam Explorer for Oracle here.