RE: Long-Term Archiving

Uwe,

Assuming you'll be using Oracle in ten years and Oracle keeps its promise, export is probably a good bet. But here's an interesting, "simple" alternative. At regular intervals, extract the app and dictionary table data to text files, extract the code to text files, keep a printed data model, and archive it all to disk, CD, DVD, etc. - some type of storage that has a good chance of being around in ten years. This allows you to read the data and be able to determine how the app handles it without actually having the app and database running. And it would work for non-Oracle databases and apps. It's a simple concept, but not a new one. And no, we haven't implemented it. We've been using export - for now.

Bob Stauffer
DBA
D&E Communications
Ephrata, PA
rstauffer_at_decommunications.com
717-738-8737
-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Uwe Küchler Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 16:25
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Long-Term Archiving

Hello fellowship of the Oracle,

due to not so recent changes in
European and German law, many companies, particularly in the financial sector, have the need to archive critical data over a long period, like 6 to 10 years.
BUT - simply using RMan or Export doesn't always suit the requirement to be able to restore data after several years. Just
think about an RMan Backup of a 9i DB that you need to restore in 10 years - we're probably at Oracle 16 or whatever, then and you probably won't be able to restore your old data to this new version. Keeping a copy of the old Oracle binaries is not the best option, either; maybe you won't have the appropriate OS version or hardware handy, then.

So I'd like
to ask the community what kind of solutions you recommend to your customers / managers, when they ask you: "How can we retrieve our data after 10 years if there is a tax audit?"

I've heard,
but haven't found a reliable pointer yet, that Oracle will support backward compatibility of the export dump format throughout the next versions. In this case, a regular snapshot of data by exporting it might be an idea. What are your thoughts on that?

Best regards from
Germany,
Uwe

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Dec 10 2008 - 07:36:52 CST