Chapter 17
Backup and Recovery
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER
- Different Types of Failures and Why They Occur
- Planing for Disasters
- How Backup Works
- Choosing the Right Backup Configuration for Your Environment
- Recovering Databases When a Problem Occurs
Data is a critical asset for an organization to maintain information about its customers, inventory, purchases, financials, and products. Over the course of many years, organizations amass information to improve the daily customer experience, as well as to leverage this information to support strategic decisions. Downtime is unacceptable and can be costly for the organization; for example, without their databases, a stock brokerage house cannot take stock orders and an airline cannot sell tickets. Every hour the database is down can add up to millions of dollars of business opportunities lost. To keep their business activities going, organizations deploy high-availability solutions, such as failover clustering, database mirroring, replication, and log shipping so that when a database server fails, they can continue to run their business on a standby database server. All these topics are covered in other chapters in this book.
In addition, the underlying storage for the database may be protected by the use of fault tolerant or highly available storage technologies such as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). Even with these fault-tolerant technologies, businesses still need to have database backups to allow recovery from a data-corrupting ...
