RE: What are the common mistakes DBA do retarding backup & Recovery?

I had a firm hire a DBA for almost twice what I was getting that insisted you could apply archives to an export/import.

And can you believe how hard it was to convince people that what they want is not necessarily what they are going to get? Especially, if he is hotter than a desert day.

Jump ahead to after I began at my new job, I was called by the company, (I never lost a transaction), and eventually realized that he had finally broke the bank with these guys -- when he did not receive success/failure emails for over two weeks for backups.... One of the reasons was because something had stopped them from running... and so no mail was being sent. The company didn't have more than two weeks worth offsite for that particular database.

Oh my. Gee.

I felt like Rodney Dangerfield then -- no respect. I don't now, and now I make almost double -- and work 1/2 as hard. Funny how things can work out for the good at least once in a while.

Duh,

Joel Patterson
Database Administrator
joel.patterson_at_crowley.com
x72546
904 727-2546

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Robert Freeman Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2007 11:10 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: What are the common mistakes DBA do retarding backup & Recovery?

1. Assuming your recovery strategy will work because it was tested a year ago.
2. Assuming your disaster recovery strategy will work because your recovery strategy was tested successfully ever.
3. Forgetting to store copies of the current version of your RDBMS software and other ancillary recovery oriented stuff.
4. Assuming your backups are successful without monitoring.
5. Backing up your NOARCHIVELOG database while it's up and running and assuming that if you have to recover from that backup that you will have Oracle find a magic way to do it (I've had at least one client tell me that very thing).
6. Use exp/imp as your primary backup tool assuming that you can apply archived redo logs to recover the database (see number one and replace "tested a year ago" with "never tested". Again, at least one client who was banking on that strategy.

RF

Robert G. Freeman
Oracle Consultant/DBA/Author
Principal Engineer/Team Manager
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Jul 05 2007 - 10:48:38 CDT