Re: Oracle and Arcserve

chuaby wrote:

> Hi
>
> I have been using an Oracle for quite some time but have not maintain
> it before until now. My application vendor is not too familiar with
> Norton Anti-virus and BrightStor ARCserve Backup Release 11 for
> Windows, Agent for Oracle.
>
> All i know was I'm being told to be careful when the database is
> running with these 2 applications. May i know what are the things i
> should not do with these applications ?
>
> i mean, eg,
>
> 1) to backup database files, can the files be opened since i have the
> "Agent for Oracle? Can i recover if index and data are active during
> the backup session?

The short answer is probably yes. But the real answer is: you can never trust a backup regime until you've actually tested it, under all sorts of failure scenarios, and satisfied yourself that the backups taken with this tool are usable for recovery.

I know it's not a 'click OK and all will be well' answer, but what you'll have to do is to read up about backup and recovery principles (http://tahiti.oracle.com has all the documentation online). Armed with that understanding, you will be in a position to judge just what exactly the vendor of this agent is claiming it is capable of doing for you.

And then you must test and verify, test and verify, test and verify those claims until you are confident your data is safe under pretty much any scenario you care to throw at it.

A lot of work, but rewarding, and very reassuring.

Anyone who tries to make life simple for you by supplying a quick answer to your question will not be doing you any favours in the reassurance stakes.

>
> 2) can the realtime Anti-virus be running as well ?

Realtime Antivirus protection, such as Norton Autoprotect, is not a good idea on an Oracle server of any description, since it will steal memory and CPU cycles from the database. If you care about performance, disable it.

Bear in mind, Norton Autoprotect is really designed to run on desktop PCs where users are forever receiving email and loading documents and executables from unknown sources. In that 'constant use' situation, a 'constant protection agent' is a good idea. But a server is not, one hopes, receiving and opening email attachments all the time, or forever having new software from dubious sources installed on it. It probably lives behind a firewall, too. Of course, a periodic -but manual- running of an antivirus scanning program might not be a bad idea in a maintenance moment if you have one. But continual monitoring is not a good idea for a production system, I think.

Whether or not there are specific adverse interactions between Oracle, Norton and ARCServer, which is what your vendor might be getting at, I couldn't say, however. I have run Oracle 8i and 9i on Windows desktop machines with Norton Autoprotect running, and I've never encountered a problem. But I've never thrown ARCServer into the mix.

Regards
HJR
> For some advice please.
> Thank you
> Boon Yiang
Received on Wed May 19 2004 - 07:34:00 CDT