Re: RMAN vs EXP/IMP

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 09:48:22 +0000, Mike Cretan wrote:

> Hey, as a developer, I'd pick export every time.... There's nothing worse
> than having to recover an entire database if you just dropped one little
> table by mistake... ;-)
>

(Another top poster - sigh)

OK, as a developer, I'm sure you are willing to run an export every time a user makes a change, right? After all, each data change represents a new test case and you don't want to miss any of those, do you?

Sarcasm aside, exports have a different purpose than backups. Yes, exports can occasionally be used with similar results, as you mention. However, there is a whole host of recovery functionality not available to environments using export-only. Similarily, there are things that exports do well that are not efficient in standard backup methods.

To the OP - Oracle has a great document at http://docs.oracle.com called "Backup and Recovery Concepts" which discusses this stuff, especially reasons, in more detail.

/FGB Received on Mon Mar 21 2005 - 06:52:07 CST