Backup Advice 1

[SQLScholar]

Hey all,

I am slowly becoming an Oracle DBA - but i am still much happier in M$ SQL.

Currently our backups are handled by an external company - but i am not convinced we have the optimum solution, and will be greatful of peoples advice and experiance. Effectively we would like a system where restore is relatively quick and easy. Up to the minute backups are currently not a priority.

For our DR we basically want a full server recovery.

I think there are 3 options for us:

Cold backup. Take offline for the evening so Veritas Backup Exec can backup all files. Restore is very easy as the files are restored, however the cache is flushed nightly, and the database is unavailable for a few hours (not end of world)

Hot backup. I am not sure how this restore would work in a full recovery (Where alot of oracle files are not backed up as they are in use). If you think this is my best bet, some instructions (link) would be really handy if you have some.

Veritas Oracle Backup. Using the BE agent. Again if you think this is a good option, some instructions for complete server failure would be great.

I appreciate ANY advice to what way is optimum to follow. Currently its done by an Export command to create a dump file - which is not good.

Many thanks

Dan

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http://www.cardboardcoder.com

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind - Dr. Seuss

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes - EW Dijkstra
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[karluk]

Everything else being equal, Oracle backups should be done through the rman utility supplied by Oracle. It gets installed in your Oracle home, along with the rest of your database software. Among other things, it has the ability to do online backups, so you don't have to take outages every night while the backup is running.

In real life, of course, things aren't always so simple. Cost in particular can be a factor. Rman itself is included in your Oracle license, so it doesn't cost anything extra to use. But the Backup Exec Oracle agent, which allows BE to interface with rman, will be an extra charge on top of your other Veritas licensing costs. If your company can afford the cost, puchasing a BE Oracle agent license would probably be the cleanest solution.

But there are viable alternatives. You could write the rman backup scripts yourself and use your job scheduler to run them independently of Backup Exec. All that requires is enough locally mounted disk on your database server to store the backup files. After the database backup is finished, you would also want Backup Exec to copy the rman backup files elsewhere to avoid the possibility that a server crash might wipe out all of your backups as well as the online database files. This option is what you have labelled "Hot backup". We use this option in our shop and it works fairly well, albeit at the cost of requiring additional disk to store both the local backup and the off site copy.

You could also dispense with rman entirely and have Backup Exec directly backup your database files. As you indicate, this would require regular outages while your database is being backed up.

 

[SQLScholar]

Karluk,

Many thanks for your post.

I would love to use backup exec to do it. However the documentation of how to use backup exec to restore an oracle DB seems to be sparse.

Do you know where i can find some?

Dan

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http://www.cardboardcoder.com

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind - Dr. Seuss

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes - EW Dijkstra
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