Preface

The three main responsibilities for a successful DBA are to ensure the availability, recoverability, and performance of any database that the DBA is accountable for. This book will focus on the recoverability set of skills, and will also include some tips and ideas regarding availability. All examples showed in the book are executed over Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.4 and Oracle Database 12.1.0.1 (also known as Oracle 12c), please be aware of these specific versions to ensure that you will be able to reproduce the same results, you will see reflected in this book.

To ensure the recoverability of any database, a DBA needs to have a strong backup and recovery skills set; this knowledge is essential for any good DBA. Without this knowledge, you will be in violation of my most important rule that I have used in my entire career, "The most important rule with respect to data is to never put yourself into an unrecoverable situation". If you follow this simple tip every time you work with data, I can guarantee that you will be always protected against any possible situation that could surprise you in your daily journey, including of course the unexpected ones.

My key intention by writing this book is that if you are a new DBA, introduce you to this fantastic world that is vital to your success. If you are an experienced DBA, this book will become a reference guide and will also help you to learn some possible new skills, or give some new ideas that you never knew about. It will also help you to easily find the solution to some of the most well-known problems you could find during your career, and this book will be rich with screenshots, full of scripts, examples, and tutorials that you will find more than useful and handy.

Most of the books currently available in the market only concentrate on the RMAN utility for backup and recovery; this book will be an exception to the rule and will become a must-have reference to allow you to achieve a real complete backup and recovery strategy. This is not in any case a replacement to the official Oracle documentation available at http://www.oracle.com/pls/db121/homepage; I will always recommend to any serious DBA to read the complete documentation set as a complement to this book.

This book contains my knowledge of more than two decades working with Oracle technologies and also shows several topics and situations that came to my attention when speaking at several conferences around the world or helping others on Oracle forums or virtual communities.

I hope you will enjoy reading this book as the same way I enjoyed writing it.