Re: Backing up Oracle

Gary - what appears in your alert logs (check the directory referenced by the "init.ora" parameter "background_dump_dest")??? A "shutdown immediate" is not exactly immediate - that mode will rollback any transactions currently underway, which may take time - if you've got a long job running, undoing it will take an appreciable amount of disk I/O, hence the delay. No new connections / sessions will be allowed to start at this time.

I guess your backup is "shell-scripted"? You might need to write some smart shell / awk type code to detect the completion of the successful shutdown; then again, you might have pissed some users off by shutting down the database anyway! A "shutdown normal" is the more usual and "database-friendly" way of closing Oracle down.

You do know that you can do "online" / "hot" backups without shutting down, don't you?

"startup force" does indeed do a "shutdown abort" followed by a "startup" - the effect is to make the server go through a fast recovery during the startup phase - that ought to fix any potential corruption by rolling back / undoing any transactions that were "in progress" at the time you issued "startup force". But sometimes it might not, hence the DBA's negative comments, I guess.

Hope some of that helps.

Jeremy

Gary Yasuda <gary_at_skypie.sp.trw.com> wrote:

>We are running Oracle 7.3.3 on Solaris 2.5.1.
>
>When the system is backed up, the databases are brought down with a
>"shutdown immediate." The backup takes place then the databases
>are brought back up with "startup."
>
>The way it is now, if someone is accessing an instance when the
>shutdown script is executing, the shutdown never takes place and
>the backup is aborted. The next morning, whatever instances were
>successfully shutdown before aborting need to be manually started
>up.
 

>It's hard to balance keeping the integrity of the database and
>backing up the server on these occasions.
>
>I'm not very well versed in Oracle. One of my colleagues told me
>that using "startup force" will kill every process on the database
>when the backup is ready to take place, so a good backup takes
>place.

>
>I passed this along to the Oracle DBA, but he claims using
>"startup force" is like a "shutdown abort" and may corrupt the
>database. Obviously, he's completely opposed to "startup force."
>
>I would appreciate if someone has a successful strategy that would
>resolve that problem. An explanation of the pros and cons of
>using "startup force" would be helpful.
Received on Fri May 22 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT