Re: A better Oracle backup scheme?

I'll re-phrase your question to illustrate the essential problem here. "Is rman faster than export" could just as well be phrased "is elephant dung yellower than lime juice on a blackboard. With wheels."

It makes no sense to compare these two. Export gives you a fairly naff old way of performing logical backup. Rman gives you a fairly spiffy way of performing physical backup. One lets you recover from user error fairly painlessly, the other lets you recover from all sorts of physical stuff ups, and logical errors, and disasters.
One means that re-performing of transactions after recovery is practically compulsory; the other means that, under the right circumstances, you lose not a single committed transaction. One could be fairly compact; the other could also be fairly compact, but might also mean duplicating byte-for-byte the original database. You have sod-all control over how export sizes its files or paces its I/O operations; you can do all of that and more with rman. Yet rman requires an expensive resetlogs in the event of recovering from the inadvertant drop of an important table. Export/import does not.

You get the idea : Elephant dung makes excellent fertilizer (so the African savannah tells me). Lime juice makes an excellent afternoon refreshing drink. I wouldn't want to fertilize the African savannah with lime juice. And the other doesn't bear thinking about.

A good DBA in a typical environment would do *both*. Then he could recover from physical problems as well as logical stuff ups. And then, too, he would have options and choices to make when it came to recovery time. Be a lime-juice drinking elephant and do both: you'll make the blackboard happy.

Regards
HJR "Mike Barnes" <mrb_at_mda.ca> wrote in message news:c72ed165.0205281333.4e6f63fc_at_posting.google.com...
> I am involved in writing the database portion of our application build
> and deployment procedures, and one of the things we have to do before
> deploying a new release is to do a database backup. Currently the
> integration team is just doing an export of all the objects under the
> relevant application user. It has been taking longer and longer as
> the size of the database grows, and they're wondering if it can be
> done faster with a method other than export. One thing that I've
> tried is direct mode export, and that seems to be faster, but is there
> anything else? For instance, would it be faster to do a backup using
> rman?
Received on Tue May 28 2002 - 16:43:09 CDT