Re: Australian trip.

"Guy G" <ggallagher_at_espeed.com> wrote in message news:470e4f07.0305081019.76ab7a88_at_posting.google.com...
> matters. Used to be 8.1.7.0 until one of the instances went south
> with rollback segment block corruption (I was in day 3 of my first
> Oracle class at the time)

Aye... Ain't it always like that?... ;)

>
> I'm only getting 2:1 or at best 3:1 compression on the datafile backup
> pieces - we're actually using a fair amount of the allocated space.
> Redo is a little better - about 5:1.

most unusual. IME, it's usually at least 10, more often much more. What you using for compress? I use gzip in unix and zip in windows.

> out of six user tablespaces, each twice per week. I arrived at this
> through trial and (much) error, finding that more frequent backups
> would fill the backup directory - at some point it is necessary to
> write a 36 GB file and compress it (another 17 GB), and this kills
> everything. Oh yeah, and it might be nice to have the recovery
> catalog on a different piece of hardware ...

Connor gave a super idea. Get hold of a reasonable PC with a fast NIC and stuff it up with the slowest and biggest capacity disks you can get, nfs the thing. It works out quite cheap and RMAN can handle it quite well. And get hold of a desktop PC with wads of redundancy and make it your catalog instance. Mine is a OEM P4 1.5GHz and controls a bucketload of NT server databases and their backups.

> Of course, this "strategy" stinks, which is why I asked that *trick*
> question - I don't think there *is* a good strategy given the
> constraints, but I'm still a bit wet behind the ears, so ...

there isn't. I'd go with Connor's idea.

> I did lay out three options to the folks with the checkbooks - keep
> using RMAN and attach lots of disk to the server ($$ for disk),

Check this one again with remotely mounted disks. It should work and save them a bundle.

> RMAN thinks it is. Maybe I'm asking too much - after all, I don't pay
> the bills, I just have to get things fixed yesterday when they break
> today.

Just let them know you might not be able to if they continue to "TCO" the hardware. Make sure it is WRITTEN somewhere you said so.

> Anyway, why complain? Where else can I have this much fun and
> get paid, too?

Yup. Quite! :D

--
Cheers
Nuno Souto
wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au