Initially, you might think that there is no need to perform backup and recovery for RAC as it already provides high availability. However, we should remember that RAC is an ideal solution for handling failures at instance level. RAC, just like any Oracle database, cannot handle failures at disk or user level, making backup and recovery an important aspect. Planning your backup and recovery strategy will ensure the smooth operation of your enterprise.
Backup and recovery of the Oracle RAC database is similar to the backup of a single-instance Oracle database, with a couple of exceptions related to the backup of Oracle RAC, with archiving enabled, and the backup of all the archivelog threads associated with each RAC instance.
Oracle 11g RAC provides backup and recovery using different approaches. In this chapter, the emphasis shall be placed on backup and recovery using RMAN; however, we shall briefly discuss the various methods along with the pros and cons of...