Re: Database accidentally left in backup mode
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:09:45 -0700
Message-Id: <5E646C63-0129-48CF-9FAE-B74A3CB16A57_at_furfly.net>
It's a different kind of snapshot, one specific to Amazon's EC2 hosting service. You have a virtual disk drive and use their API tools to take a snapshot of it, which is the standard way of doing backups. However, if the database isn't in hot backup mode the snapshot of those files is useless. Yes, I can and do back it up in other ways as well, but since I'm making the snapshots and paying for the storage anyway, I wanted them to be usable. It has been very handy when setting up instances for testing to be able to clone a new volume from a snapshot; I bring up Oracle on the new volume, issue the "end backup" command, restart Oracle (not sure why this is needed but it seems to be) and away I go. I couldn't restore any other kind of backup that fast.
janine
On Mar 16, 2010, at 8:56 AM, Guillermo Alan Bort wrote:
> That is also possible using a physical standby database (or dataguard). For the most critical databases we have a RAC and a standby DB. Backups are taken from the standby db (we have at most 15 minutes of delay).
> Alan.-
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Harel Safra <harel.safra_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16/03/2010 02:46, Guillermo Alan Bort wrote:
> You know... I am amazed when I see a 9i database backed up with 'begin/end'. An 11g? I mean... come on! RMAN is very easy to set up for a disk backup. A bit more difficult if a MML is involved, but that's about it. You can get very complicated if you want to, but in general it's fairly simple. And you wouldn't have hit this little problem ;-)
>
> Your forgetting that the OP wanted to take a storage snapshot of his database. The only supported way to do that is to shut down the database or put it in backup mode.
>
> RMAN is fine if you want your backups to run on your production servers. If you want to offload backups to a backup server you need to move the data there, usually using split mirror backups (snap/clone/BCV/...) of the database that are done with alter database begin/end backup.
>
> Harel Safra
>
--- Janine Sisk President/CEO of furfly, LLC 503-693-6407 -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Tue Mar 16 2010 - 11:09:45 CDT