zip oracle datafiles

[Thiko]

We have some oracle datafiles *.ORA of a considerable size and they need to be sent by ftp accross the network to the standby database machine.

Is it save to zip up these datafiles and unzip them on the other side?

At the momemnt at their current size they are taking too long to ftp..... Many Thanks.

Thiko!

 

[lboschetto]

Actually, it is safer to send them zipped than not.

There are two families of compression utilities: lossy and lossless. Lossy ones are used for compressing images, audio and video, where loosing some information is not a problem. This makes it possible to achieve greater compression ratios. Examples are JPG, MPG, AVI, MP3...

Lossless compression, as ZIP is, is used to compress all other kinds of data files, and ensures that no information is lost in the process of compressing and decompressing.

Moreover, most compression utilities -- as ZIP does -- store a CRC, which is kind of a checksum, into the ZIPped file. This allows the decompressor to detect whether there has been any trouble during transmission or storage of the file. This adds one more layer of safety!

HTH.

 

[raygg]

As a DBA for a software company I have often send and receive exported database files thru the internet with no loss. Use the oracle export utility to export your database to my.dmp Then zip my.dmp to my.zip. Email my.zip.
The major problem you may encounter is sending too large a file. Using this approach I just received some tables from a customer database that had a 10-1 compression once zipped. If the export is too large, break it up by doing exports of selected schemas or tables. I have no problems with this approach. Be careful about using the compress option with the export - you may have problems with BLOB tables. If you want to use the compress feature, put the BLOB tables into their own export file and compress everything else into another export.