Backup and recovery is a crucial and important job for a DBA to protect business data. As data storage grows larger each year, DBAs are continually challenged to ensure that critical data is backed up and that it can be recovered quickly and easily to meet business needs. Very large databases are unique in that they are large and data may come from many resources. OLTP and data warehouse systems have some distinct characteristics. Generally, the availability considerations for a very large OLTP system are no different from the considerations for a small OLTP system. Assuming a fixed allowed downtime, a large OLTP system requires more hardware resources than a small OLTP system.
This chapter proposes an efficient backup and recovery strategy for very large databases to reduce the overall resources necessary to support backup and recovery by using some special characteristics that differentiate data warehouses from OLTP systems.
This chapter contains the following sections: