1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Managing Recovery Appliance
  3. Archiving Backups to Cloud
  4. Grouping Backup Pieces

Grouping Backup Pieces

The performance of copy-to-tape and archive-to-cloud is improved by grouping archived logs from protected databases' real-time redo into fewer number of backup sets.

Protected databases can achieve real-time protection by enabling real-time redo transport to the Recovery Appliance. Each received redo log on the appliance is compressed and written to the storage location as an individual archived log backup. These log backups can be archived to tape or cloud, to support fulls and incremental backups that are archived for long-term retention needs.

  • To tape: use Oracle Secure Backup (OSB) module or a third-party backup software module installed on the Recovery Appliance.

  • To cloud: use the Cloud Backup SBT module.

Inter-job latencies can happen between writing each backup piece during copy-to-tape operations. When the number of backup pieces is high, this pause constitutes a large percentage of the time the tape drive is unavailable. This means five (5) 10GB pieces will go to tape more quickly than fifty (50) 1GB pieces.

Recovery Appliance addresses inter-job latency by grouping the archived log backup pieces together and copying them as a single backup piece. Therefore this results in larger backup pieces on tape storage than previous releases. This feature is enabled by default. DMBS_RA CONFIG has the parameter group_log_max_count for setting the maximum archived logs per backup piece that is copied to tape; its default is 1. The group_log_backup_size_gb parameter is used to limit the size of these larger backup pieces; its default is 256 GB.