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Veritas NetBackup™ for Oracle Administrator's Guide

Last Published: 2018-09-17

Product(s): NetBackup (8.1.2)

NetBackup for Oracle operation using the Oracle Intelligent Policy

The Oracle Intelligent Policy feature lets you create a policy that specifies one or more Oracle instances to be backed up. You manage instances in an instance repository available on the NetBackup Administration Console. The instance repository contains all discovered and manually created Oracle instances that reside in the NetBackup environment. Instance management lets you add, change, delete, and register instances with a set of credentials.

See Instance management for an Oracle Intelligent Policy.

To create an Oracle Intelligent Policy, you can use the Policy Configuration Wizard or the Policies utility. The Policy Configuration Wizard is easier to use because it guides you through the setup process by automatically choosing the best values for most configurations. But the wizard does not present all policy configuration options (for example, calendar-based scheduling). After you create a policy, you can use the Policies utility to configure the options that are not part of the wizard.

Policy creation includes assigning instances to the policy. The Oracle Intelligent Policy does not require you to know how RMAN functions or how to use the templates and scripts. The feature is instance-based and not template-scripting based.

See Creating an Oracle Intelligent Policy (OIP).

NetBackup for Oracle includes a library of functions that enable RMAN to use NetBackup. On UNIX, NetBackup uses the RMAN SBT_LIBRARY parameter to link the RMAN server software with the media management API library that NetBackup for Oracle installs. On Windows, the NetBackup for Oracle library is located in c:\Windows\system32.

See Installing NetBackup for Oracle.

When you back up Oracle database instances, each resultant backup set contains at least one backup piece from the target database. You must give each backup piece a unique name. Several substitution variables are available to aid in generating unique names. The policy utility provides a set of default file name formats for the backup pieces. NetBackup considers the backup piece name as the file being backed up, so this name must be unique in the catalog.

To override any of the default file name formats, select Specify backup file name formats. You can change the formats for the various backup file names for data files, archived redo logs, the control file, and the Fast Recovery Area (FRA). Ensure that the format that is specified for all RMAN backup piece names ends with _%t to guarantee that each backup piece has a unique name in the catalog. NetBackup uses this timestamp as part of its search criteria for catalog images. Without this timestamp, performance may degrade as the NetBackup catalog grows.

For a backup, the following items apply:

The rman command starts the requested operation on the databases.
When the process requires media to store backup data, RMAN issues a backup request to start a user-directed backup.
The NetBackup media server connects to NetBackup for Oracle on the client. NetBackup for Oracle on the client sends the database data to the NetBackup media server which saves the data to secondary storage. A restore operation works in essentially the same manner except that RMAN issues a restore request. Then NetBackup retrieves the data from secondary storage and sends it to NetBackup for Oracle on the client.
RMAN supports parallel operations, so that a single rman command can start more than one backup, or restore on the NetBackup system.
The status for an RMAN operation is stored in the RMAN catalog or in the database control file. This same status appears in the output of the RMAN command that is used to run the backup or restore. This status is the only status that a database administrator must check to verify that a backup or restore has been successful.
You can see the RMAN script and RMAN output in the details of the controlling job (bphdb) in the Activity Monitor.
NetBackup also logs status, but only for its own part of the operation. The database administrator cannot use the NetBackup status to determine whether rman was successful. Errors can occur in rman that do not affect NetBackup and are not recorded in its logs.