When a parallel backup takes place there are several backup processes started. Each one is responsible for processing one file at a time. Oracle is aware that this strategy is fine for the current average database size, but this strategy soon may not be enough.
This scalable solution for backups is also known as the multi-section backup. Each datafile is divided into a defined number of sections, each section is defined as a contiguous range of database blocks, and each parallel process takes care of one section at a time, so several parallel processes manage a big database file at the same time.
Let's issue the command to perform the multi section backup:
# One-off configuration of device type and parallelism. CONFIGURE DEVICE TYPE sbt PARALLELISM 4; CONFIGURE DEFAULT DEVICE TYPE TO sbt; # Divides the tablespace in 512M sections. RUN { BACKUP SECTION SIZE 512M TABLESPACE any_huge_TS; }
Some issues you should...