Calm your Fear of losing data, High availability to the rescue

I am sharing one of my inner most feelings, and that is the fear of losing data. As a DBA  its considered normal, except if your database is a read only system or your Dad can't fire you because you are about to inherit the family business which is usually not the case for most of us.
It is always assumed that backups are done and tested until you are confronted with a backup that you can't restore or you realize that no backups exist.
Oracle has taken great steps to ensure that its almost impossible for you to loose data and if you do you can quickly recover with minimum downtime at a very low cost. Below is a list features in Oracle 11g to calm your fears or mine. I will be discussing and dissecting these topics as we go along, so fear no more my friend.

• Flashback Technologies 
• Recovery Manager (RMAN)
• Automatic Storage Management (ASM)
• Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespace
• Oracle Data Guard
• Oracle GoldenGate
• Oracle Streams
• Oracle Secure Backup
• Oracle Real Application Clusters 
• Oracle Clusterware 
• Online Reorganization

Now that Oracle owns Sun and you can use ASM to create mirrors at a low cost, I wonder how this will affect companies in the storage business.

Dirty Buffers.