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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: RMAN & SQL Backtrack
I think Robert Freeman's book is essential. Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference at
$13 U.S. is an easy decision.
I started before Robert's book was published and the book which really helped me get off the ground is Oracle Backup & Recovery 101. It is about 1/2 RMAN, and has some really simple step-by-step tutorials. Simple enough even I could understand. Robert has tutorials as well, but I haven't performed those. So if you get stuck getting the idea behind RMAN, consider this book.
Dennis Williams
DBA, 80%OCP, 100% DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Arup Nanda [mailto:orarup_at_hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 12:25 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack
Wow! Heady!!
It's mighty nice of you to include my name in this illustrious list, Mladen; but I don't consider myself to be in the same league :) Better yet, count yourself in there.
Talking about the business at hand - you are absolutely right; one of the
"myths" (of the several) is that RMAN is free. It is, as long as you don't
put it on tape. Once you bring tape to the picture, you are talking money,
sometimes big money (as in Tivoli), sometimes small (as in BrightStor).
However, the solution to usedisk could still be relevant and applicable in
some cases, especially in small companies.
Besides the Freeman book, I would also suggest another one - Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference by Darl Kuhn and Scott Schulze, ISBN 0-596-00233-5. It predates the Freeman book and I learned my ropes from it. It's a pocket reference; but it's truly one of those things where size belies the content.
Learning curve could be formidable. Remember you need to learn a new
"language", and it is arcane. When youventure into territories of tuning the
tape buffers, etc, the process could be quite involved. I just finished
setting up and tuning a RMAN setup for a 2 TB database using IBM Tivoli
Storage Manager agent and the details of the process using the IBM Red Books
was nightmarish!
Regards,
Arup Nanda
I don't have any experience with SQL*Backtrack and I do have some experience
with RMAN. Here are my comments:
a) RMAN is reliable. Once you write the backup scripts, they are executed by
operations
and there no surprises. In order to rely on those scripts, one needs to test them, especially
the recovery part.
b) RMAN needs a 3rd party backup software to run. Things like OmniBackup,
Tivoli, Legato or
SyncSort can be rather expensive. RMAN doesn't write to tapes itself. RMAN delegates a
backup software contacted through the routines from libobk.so (or libobk.dll or libobk.sl) to
do its writing. To get the "libobk.so" from you backup software vendor of choice, you generally
have to write a check. That means that RMAN is NOT free. c) Before version 9, RMAN was arcane and hard to learn. Thanks to Robert Freeman, it is no
longer so. You can learn how to configure and use RMAN and you can find a decent book
to learn RMAN from. It's not very hard and it's fairly logical. One reading of the books suffices
for a good general understanding.
d) Quality of the software: RMAN leaves a lot to be desired. Its biggest
drawback is the fact that
it doesn't do any coordination with the underlying backup catalog. In other words, you can happily
declare backup obsolete in RMAN and Legato will not know anything about it and vice versa.
You can even delete backup in Legato and reuse the tape while RMAN knows nothing about it.
On the other hand, RMAN, in contrast to all other methods, does not put tablespaces into the
backup mode, thus generating floods of redo archives. RMAN doesn't backup data blocks that
have never been used ("behind the watermark blocks"), which is great if you have a fresh new
datafile which was added to the tablespace just in case something might
run out of space.
e) Personnel. Despite the certification process, it is not always easy to
find a trained personnel
which knows how to use it and how to recover the database. I consider the ability to recover
the database a basis for someone to call himself/herself a DBA. You would be surprised how
many people which claim that title do not know how to recover the database. Even smaller number
knows how to use RMAN.
f) I would suggest Jared Still, Cary Millsap, Rachel Carmichael, Jonathan
Lewis, Wolfgang Breitling,
Steve Adams, Gaja V., Arup Nanda, Kirti Deshpande and Anjo Kolk to start the Oracle List certification
process. I would trust that one more then the OCP. I apologize to anyone who I might have forgotten.
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
Phone:(203) 459-6855
Email:mgogala_at_oxhp.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Smith, Ron L. [mailto:rlsmith_at_kmg.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 10:59 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: RMAN & SQL Backtrack
We have been using SQL Backtrack for backup and recovery for about 6 years now. We are being pressured to start using RMAN because it is free. Makes sense but I am wondering about reliability, complexity, learning curve, etc...
Has anyone had experience with both products or anyone new to RMAN that can give me an idea of what to expect?
Thanks!
Ron
If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail message, any use, distribution or copying of the message is prohibited. Please let me know Received on Wed Jul 16 2003 - 13:50:11 CDT
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