Oracle 12c New Feature: How to backup pluggable databases

Oracle 12c introduced the new multi-tenant feature called Pluggable Databases (PDB). We will show how to take a backup of the pluggable database components in this post.

Setup for RMAN with Oracle 12c

In order to use the Oracle 12c Recovery Manager (RMAN) utility for pluggable database backups, you need to first enable archivelog mode.

Once archivelog mode is enabled, we can take a backup of the pluggable database

Now we can verify that the backup image is available from RMAN for our pluggable database

Backup for root component of Oracle 12c Pluggable Databases

In a nutshell, an Oracle 12c PDB consists of two parts: a root component and a seed component that includes the data. Earlier we performed a full database backup of the entire pluggable database but let us say that we just want to backup the root itself. We can do so with the RMAN command BACKUP DATABASE ROOT as shown in the following example:

Now let us verify the root backup for our PDB with Oracle 12c:

Stay tuned when we visit how to restore pluggable databases with RMAN and Oracle 12c!

Oracle 12c Installation on Oracle Linux 6

Dear readers, I decided to finally get around to installing Oracle 12c (12.1.0) on Oracle Linux 6 today. One key difference is the increased disk space requirements from 11g to 12c for the basic database configuration. I recall that 11gR2 requires almost 4GB of disk storage space. Now, for a basic enterprise installation with Oracle 12c, you need at least 6.4Gb of disk space!

Pre-requisites for Oracle Linux 6 with Oracle 12c

Oracle Linux 6 requirements are available online from Oracle documentation. To simplify package and OS dependency requirements, you can deploy the Oracle Linux 6 RPM available from Oracle called oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall

Wim Coekerts has a good write up on this:

https://blogs.oracle.com/wim/entry/easily_install_oracle_rdbms_12cr1

Here is the basic screen shot of the storage requirements for 12c:

Like the previous setup screens for 11gR2 we have choice of desktop versus server class database system with Oracle so I will not bore you with these details.

Now we have the new choice to configure the database and also the new multi-tenant feature called pluggable database

One difference in the configuration lies instead of using the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) console, Oracle 12c installer now asks you if you wish to use the new Oracle 12c Cloud Control. Since for sake of first setup with 12c, we are not using this option, we ignore it.

Now we are off to the races for the actual installation for 12c:

At the end, run the usual root.sh scripts that are called out for under root user.

We verify the status of the newly created Oracle 12c database:

The new Oracle 12c management console has a host of new features as shown below that we will explore in future posts:

Stay tuned!