Re: Does the Rman Catalog hold tape volume names?

From: Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:09:20 -0800
Message-ID: <bf46380902101509u6be68054m2a5d9127a34066f5_at_mail.gmail.com>



On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Allen, Brandon <Brandon.Allen_at_oneneck.com>wrote:

> Just beware - the information from the media column will be useless if your
> backup is going to a disk staging area before it goes to tape, and it also
> won't tell you if your backup spanned multiple tapes, or if it was migrated
> later to a different tape from the original by your media management
> software. It's really just there for looks - it can't be relied on.
>

I'm not familiar with Tivoli, but have a little experience with NetBackup.

If the tapes are vaulted, (copied to another tape that is taken offsite) in NetBackup, then RMAN no longer has the correct tape label.

Retrieving a tape from off-site storage requires using a netbackup utility to query the tape catalog based on the date to which we want to restore a database, and then request those tapes back from storage.

RMAN has the correct tape label up until the time the tape is vaulted.

After that point, RMAN is useless for retrieving tapes from storage, as the NBU MML does not update RMAN with the new labels.

Once the tapes are back in place, no problem, as both the RMAN and NBU catalogs can correlate based on backup piece name.

And if you've obsoleted those old backups and cleaned them out of the RMAN catalog: well, I don't know how to work around that scenario.

Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
Received on Tue Feb 10 2009 - 17:09:20 CST

Original text of this message