+ORACLE-BASE.com Tim hall came up with a brilliant idea to appreciate OTN for all the ways it helped shape the Oracle Community. I have to say thati whole heartedly agree and here is my contribution for #ThanksOTN.
Recovery Appliance or RA or ZDLRA is something I've been very passionate about since its release and thus this very biased post on RA. Recovery Appliance is Database Backup and Recovery on Steroids . The ability to do fulls and incremental backups is something that every product boasts, so whats special about ZDLRA. Its the Ability to sleep in peace, its the ability to know my backups are good.
To Quote this Article from DBTA which is for Sqlserver and 2009
"To summarize, data deduplication is a great feature for backing up desktops, collaboration systems, web applications, and email systems. If I were a DBA or storage administrator, however, I'd skip deduplicating databases files and backups and devote that expensive technology to the areas of my infrastructure where it can offer a strong ROI"
This notion really hasn't changed much though de-duplication software has come a long way.
Why de-dup when you dont even send what you dont need , and thats what the Recovery Appliance brings to the table. Send less data and recover as whole , no more restoring L0's then applying L1's and redo . Just ask to recover a virtual Full and redo needed to get to that point will be sent . This makes the Restore and recovery Process automated much faster than traditional backups.
This couple with automatic block checking , built in validation makes the RA something i'm personally proud of a product that i work with and it truly makes my database recovery on steroids.