This is the first installment in a blog series, which examines the results of a recent database protection survey conducted by Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) Magazine.

All Oracle IT professionals know that a sound, well-tested backup and recovery strategy plays a foundational role in protecting their Oracle database investments, which in many cases, represent the lifeblood of business operations. But just how common are the data protection strategies used and the challenges faced across various enterprises? In January 2014, Database Trends and Applications Magazine (DBTA), in partnership with Oracle, released the results of its “Oracle Database Management and Data Protection Survey”. Two hundred Oracle IT professionals were interviewed on various aspects of their database backup and recovery strategies, in order to identify the top organizational and operational challenges for protecting Oracle assets.
Here are some of the key findings from the survey:

• The majority of respondents manage backups for tens to hundreds of databases, representing total data volume of 5 to 50TB (14% manage 50 to 200 TB and some up to 5 PB or more).
  
• About half of the respondents (48%) use HA technologies such as RAC, Data Guard, or storage mirroring, however these technologies are deployed on only 25% of their databases (or less).
  
• This indicates that backups are still the predominant method for database protection among enterprises. Weekly full and daily incremental backups to disk were the most popular strategy, used by 27% of respondents, followed by daily full backups, which are used by 17%. Interestingly, over half of the respondents reported that 10% or less of their databases undergo regular backup testing.
  

 A few key backup and recovery challenges resonated across many of the respondents:

• Poor performance and impact on productivity (see Figure 1)
  
• 38% of respondents indicated that backups are too slow, resulting in prolonged backup windows.
  
• In a similar vein, 23% complained that backups degrade the performance of production systems.
  
• Lack of continuous protection (see Figure 2)
  
• 35% revealed that less than 5% of Oracle data is protected in real-time.
  
•  Management complexity
  
• 25% stated that recovery operations are too complex. (see Figure 1)
  
•  31% reported that backups need constant management. (see Figure 1)
  
• 45% changed their backup tools as a result of growing data volumes, while 29% changed tools due to the complexity of the tools themselves.

Figure 1: Current Challenges with Database Backup and Recovery

Figure 2: Percentage of Organization’s Data Backed Up in Real-Time or Near Real-Time

In future blogs, we will discuss each of these challenges in more detail and bring insight into how the backup technology industry has attempted to resolve them.