Protecting Oracle Databases with HCC Using Veritas NetBackup
As organizations continue to adopt Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) to achieve substantial data reduction and performance optimization for data warehousing workloads, it becomes increasingly critical to ensure robust protection strategies for these databases. Veritas NetBackup delivers comprehensive support for Oracle databases leveraging HCC, seamlessly integrating with Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to enable high-performance, policy-driven backups that maintain data integrity across both HCC-enabled and non-HCC storage environments. NetBackup leverages RMAN’s block-level capabilities to perform efficient full and incremental backups of Oracle databases, including those utilizing HCC on Oracle-engineered systems like Exadata and ZFS Storage Appliances. Through tight RMAN integration, NetBackup preserves the compression format during backup, minimizing storage consumption and backup windows while supporting deduplication for further optimization. This allows database administrators to maintain their HCC benefits even in backup and recovery workflows, while centralizing control and reporting through NetBackup’s interface. In recovery scenarios, NetBackup supports full flexibility whether restoring to an HCC-capable system or to a non-HCC environment. When recovering to an HCC-compatible platform, the compressed data remains usable in its native format, preserving both performance and storage efficiency. If recovery is directed to a non-HCC destination—such as traditional file systems or third-party storage—the restore process completes successfully, but the data must be uncompressed before it can be accessed. Full guidance on these options is available in Oracle’s official documentation on restoring HCC tables. NetBackup ensures that backup and recovery operations remain consistent and reliable across both HCC and non-HCC environments.
Data to Tapes Not Compressed
I am using LTO6 tapes with the HPE MSL2024 tape library. I am sure the Hardware Compression has been enabled at the tape library level, but the data writing to the tapes does not seem to be compressed at all. Each tape shows Full when the usage reachs to 2.8TB which is just raw capacity. BTW, my NetBackup system is a NetBackup Appliance 5230. It looks like the hardware compression is disabled from the Appliance somewhere. Any idea would appreciated. Ross
