12 Days of #Cloud: Cloning #DBaaS Instance

12 Days of #Cloud: Day 8

It is very easy to stand up a new DBaaS instance as a replica or clone of an existing instance. In this demo, I am going to create a new instance as a copy of CLDB4ACED DBaaS instance.

First, need to create a snapshot using the DBaaS instance menu. Periodic snapshots as a backup may be a good idea too.

Choose the instance where you want to create the snapshot, and go to the Administration tile where you can see Patches, Snapshots, and Backups. Click on the “Create Snapshot”.

Provide a name for the snapshot and an optional description.

There is no outage to the source database while the snapshot is happening, but the warning says that the instance is in “backup mode”.

In the alert log, found the following messages when the snapshot was created.

The snapshot got created in few minutes (about 3 in my case).

And, just for reference, these are the file systems and sizes when the snapshot was taken.

Let’s use this snapshot to build a new DBaaS instance.

Choose the snapshot menu item “Create Database Clone”.

Provide information similar to when creating a new #DBaaS instance. You cannot change the “Subscription Type” and “Software Edition”. They inherit the qualities of the snapshot.

Provide instance details on the next screen. The items inside the red boxes only are updatable (which is obvious).

The next screen shows the summary.

In few minutes, the DBaaS instance is ready. And the file systems and mount points are exactly same as in the source. The new database is up and running, with the same PDBs as in the source.

After the cloned instance was successfully created, notice the “Linked Clones” item shows 1. Earlier no clones were linked to the snapshot.

Since a database is linked to this snapshot, I will not be able to delete this snapshot.

When my cloned instance purpose is satisfied, there is no need to keep the instance running and pay Oracle. Let me delete the instance and snapshot. I can always create a new one if the need arises again in future.

Go to “Oracle Database Cloud Services” menu and delete the instance.

The instance status changed to “Terminating” and after a few minutes the instance disappeared.

Now I can delete the snapshot as well.

If there is an issue on a DBaaS instance, it is very easy to make a copy of the DBaaS instance using snapshot and perform the troubleshooting in the cloned instance until the fix is tested and confirmed.

Happy cloning!