Oracle: Flash Recovery

A new feature available in Oracle 10g is Oracle Flash Recovery. Flash Recovery is designed to make it easier and more straightforward to perform Oracle Backups and Recovery by providing a Centralised Location for all the files related to your database backup.

The Flash recovery Area is an area of a disk, or a separate disk, that is dedicated to the storage of database backup files and recovery information. It is held completely separate to all other areas of the Oracle database.

The Flash Recovery Area is used in the following ways:

Enterprise Manager can stores its backups here
Oracle can store the Archived Redo Logs here
RMAN can store and maintain details of it’s files here

In short: All files necessary to recover the database in the unlikely event of a media failure are stored as part of the Flash Recovery Area.

The default location for the Flash Recovery Area is ORACLE_BASE/flash_recovery_area. The size of this area defaults to 2GB but can be altered as necessary.

I see the Flash Recovery Area as a simple but extremely powerful and useful facility within Oracle 10g. Only the naming is unfortunate, this is not to be confused with another new feature that came out with 9i, the Flashback Query or Flashback Table facility.

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