1.2.13 Protection Against Data Corruption

Data corruptions, while rare, can have a catastrophic effect on a database, and therefore on a business.

Oracle Exadata System Software takes data protection to the next level by protecting business data, not just the physical bits.

The key approach to detecting and preventing corrupted data is block checking in which the storage subsystem validates the Oracle block contents. Oracle Database validates and adds protection information to the database blocks, while Oracle Exadata System Software detects corruptions introduced into the I/O path between the database and storage. The Storage Server stops corrupted data from being written to disk. This eliminates a large class of failures that the database industry had previously been unable to prevent.

Unlike other implementations of corruption checking, checks with Oracle Exadata System Software operate completely transparently. No parameters need to be set at the database or storage tier. These checks transparently handle all cases, including Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) disk rebalance operations and disk failures.