Switch redo logs hourly to provide point-in-time?

Question

Hi All,
Oracle 11G on Windows 2008 R2
I am learning the details of managing backups/restores and want to be able to provide a good point-in-time capability in case of a disaster. Is it good practice to schedule an hourly job that does ALTER SYSTEM SWITCH LOGFILE; ? Does this cause the redo log to be archived every hour so if I needed to restore, I know that I can at least restore to the previous hour (using the archive logs) and before?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Aman beat me to what I was going to say.  I'll just add a couple of points:
This really needs to established in concert with management, normally called an SLA (Service Level Agreement).  In a nutshell, you define what kinds of failures you allow for, how quickly recoveries or other procedures such as failovers will happen, what uptime is required, and so forth.  Of course, in reality many places won't spend the dollars to properly evaluate these things unless they are about to spend millions on an upgrade, so for ordinary places with ordinary business software the 15-30 minute rule covers many common recovery situations as a first approximation.  Simply asking management often gets a wrong or inadequate answer.
Personally, I find there are times of large loads or updates, so I size redo to handle those by testing, then use the lag target to have a reasonable time switch during normal operations.  This winds up requiring large redo, but archived redo is much smaller, except of course during the heavy times.  The same with undo also; yearly operations or massive updates require large undo, so just keep it around rather than trying to size it under the gun when it fails the next year.  Redo is a critical resource, and may benefit from special filesystem handling, depending on your storage hardware.
Job number one for a DBA is to not lose data, so recovery skills are critical, to the point of sometimes having to push management to do things right when they don't understand the value of their data.