recovery

[joeythelips]

Hi,

I have an oracle 8.1.7 databasae. It is in archivelog mode.
However, i am a beginner and not sure where to start if i have a failure.

Could anyone recommend somewhere for me to begin.

Joe

 

[karluk]

The first thing you should do is review your backup strategy. How often do you do backups? Do you ship backups to an offsite location in case your computer center is destroyed by fire? Do you use rman to manage backups? If so, do you use a recovery catalog? Do you have a way to restore the recovery catalog in case you lose both your primary database and the recovery database?

After you determine how your databases are being backed up, the main thing to do is get lots of practice in various recovery scenarios. For sure you should be able to demonstrate an ability to recover from total loss of your database, control files and (if used) the rman catalog. You may also need to master techniques like tablespace point in time recovery.

In general the most serious problem with recovery is the lack of adequate practice. It's something you don't have to do every day, so it's easy to put off. However, it's suicidal to wait until an actual disaster to show that you can perform a successful recovery. It's too likely you'll suddenly discover that some critical data file is missing and you have to report to your boss that the database is unrecoverable.

 

[Dagon]

If you are running in noarchivelog mode, you need to be shutting the database down nightly and doing a full dump of the database files. You could also look at doing exports.

 

[joeythelips]

Hi,

i do an export every night.
is ther any websites that could bring me thru this on a step by step basis?

 

[karluk]

I guess you need to know whether a nightly export is adequate backup. That is determined by your recovery requirements. If you know for sure that it's ok to lose a day's work and go back to the most recent export, then you may not need anything more sophisticated. On the other hand, if you are doing exports from lack of experience in other backup strategies, you should work on improving your skills. A good place to start is the rman manual that comes on your Oracle documentation cd.

By the way, Dagon, the rman documentation strongly suggests that rman can do online backups even if the database is not running in archivelog mode. Recovery is limited to the point in time when the backup was taken. I've never tried it, but (if it works) it's a significant difference from earlier versions of Oracle.

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

I still use good 'ol shell scripts for all my hot backups (would share/post upon request). never trust your job to anything which requires a "repository" for "metadata".

I've never liked rman or any Oracle tool (D2K, OEM, Discoverer, etc.) for that matter. their rdbms may still be the gold standard but their tools are overpriced, flaming bags of poo (except the ones they bundle with EE, which are just flamming bags of poo).

hot backups are actually surprisingly easy to do (& script/automate) once you understand the how they work.

just my 2c/never 2Bho but if you don't know how to do it with a bash shell, SQL*Plus or Perl odds are you shouldn't be doing it...