Re: Is RMAN stable enough to trust your backup to it?

On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 22:15:32 +0200, "Anton Buijs" <aammbuijs_at_xs4all.nl> wrote:

>We are considering to start using RMAN to make backups, both offline backup
>and hot backup.
>Environment: Oracle V8.1.7.3 EE 64-bit HP-UX 11i with Veritas as backup
>tool.
>
>My main concern is if it's stable. The horror scenario is that I can't
>restore a backup because a backup set appears to be corrupt because of a
>RMAN bug.
>
>Who has enough experience with RMAN to convince me that I can sleep well
>while RMAN makes the backups?
>
>Anton Buijs

I am currently working with RMAN, and so far the main concern has been the O/S going out of sync with the RMAN catalog database. Some people are really scared by an archivelog disk filling up and take any measure they deem appropiate, including throwing away archive logs which have not yet been backed up.
For the rest: it definitely does the job, though the tool comes with it's own scripting language, and the features available are both rich and limited (It is nice you can tag a backup set, it is less nice you have to hard code the tag in your script, and the integration with Korn Shell and other tools is limited. But you could of course always sed a template script, which is a route I am now embarking on) The main issue with RMAN is, the usual issue with any piece of Oracle software: if you plan to rely on a default install, without proper maintenance procedures (you never expire your backups, you have savesets consisting of only very few files), without proper tuning, you will soon get yourself hurt. In our case the application vendor dumped a default RMAN procedure over the fence, and we are still suffering from it.
But so far, apart from these flaws, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't proceed. I tested a restore and once I got a proper procedure in place (the RMAN documentation is complete and incomplete, because it doesn't tell to much about how to handle the O/S backup sw, in your case Veritas), I simply could sit back and wait, there were no hassles at all with archivelogs etc.

As we are both Dutch, I would be willing to share experiences 'offline', in our own vernacular.

Regards

Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA

To reply remove -verwijderdit from my e-mail address Received on Thu Jun 20 2002 - 15:49:52 CDT