Backing Up and Restoring OSM Files and Data

8 Backing Up and Restoring OSM Files and Data

This chapter helps you understand how Oracle Communications Order and Service Management (OSM) is related to the Oracle Database backup and restore procedures.

About Backing Up and Restoring OSM Files and Data

It is critical that you have a schedule and procedures for backing up and restoring your production-ready OSM system. This chapter includes a suggested schedule and backup and restore considerations, as well as information about the components involved in the backup. You must consider your own business needs when determining your backup and restore strategy.

Backup and Restore Overview

Consider OSM information from the Oracle Database for backing up and restoring OSM.

Backup and Restore Schedule

Oracle Database

You should perform a complete backup of the OSM database after installation. The suggested schedule for post-install backups is to take an incremental (level 0 in RMAN) backup of the database monthly, a cumulative (level 1 in RMAN) backup weekly and a differential (level 1 in RMAN) backup daily. It is currently not possible to take consistent backups of database and transaction logs, because the transaction logs are file-based. For highest reliability use a highly available fault-tolerant storage (for example, SAN) for database and transaction log file stores.

Backup and Restore Considerations

Overall considerations for OSM backup and restore include:

Test backup and restore procedures in a test or staging environment before they are used in production.

Oracle Database Backup Considerations

The Oracle Database Server provides several means of backing up information. The two recommended methods for ordinary backup and restore are provided in this section. There are no special considerations for OSM in determining the actual procedure for a backup or restore. Information about how to use the backup and restore methods considered in this section can be found in the Oracle Database documentation.

Database backup and restore procedures should be performed by a qualified database administrator.

RMAN Considerations

Recovery Manager (RMAN) is an Oracle Database utility that backs up, restores, and recovers Oracle databases. It backs up individual datafiles, and provides complete and incremental backup options. Following are some issues you should consider for using RMAN:

Because it backs up datafiles, this method is most appropriate for use when OSM is not sharing any tablespaces with other applications. If OSM is sharing its tablespaces with other applications, they will be backed up at the same time. This means that if the OSM data is restored, the information for any other applications will be restored as well. This may not be desired.
You should back up all of the permanent tablespaces that you have defined for OSM. For example, if you have different tablespaces for data and indexes, you should remember to back up both of them.
RMAN may be slower than Flashback. This might be an issue in a large production environment.

Oracle Flashback Technology Considerations

Oracle Flashback Technology comprises a group of features that support the viewing of past states of data without needing to restore backups. It provides the ability to restore an entire database or individual tables from a set point in time. Following are some issues you should consider if you choose to employ this backup method:

Because it backs up the entire database, this method is most appropriate for use when OSM is not sharing the database with other applications. If OSM is sharing the database instance with other applications, this method does not allow you to restore only the OSM portion of the database. This can cause data for other applications to be overwritten with older data.
The Flashback Database command does not restore or perform media recovery on files, so you cannot use it to correct media failures such as disk crashes.
Some editions of the Oracle Database software may not include this feature.

Mirroring Technology Considerations

Split mirrored hardware and software solutions provide a higher level of performance than RMAN and Oracle Flash Technology. Mirroring technology, such as the Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, enables very fast backup and restore that you can run online without overloading the system. You can use mirror splitting to back up ASM disks, the RDBMS data files, redo logs, and control files.

Oracle recommends that you consider a mirroring technology over other technologies for larger OSM installations. Using a mirroring solution in large OSM installations, provides the following benefits:

Before you purge a partition or upgrade OSM, Oracle recommends that you backup the database in case of a failure. Mirroring technology enables fast database backup and restore operations. This ability greatly reduces the time it takes to prepare for a purge or upgrade and reduces the time it takes to recover from purge or upgrade failures.
Taking a database snapshot for testing an upgrade procedure, troubleshooting a problem, and so on, becomes much less time consuming.