Re: Any APIs for Backup and Recovery ?

Howard J. Rogers wrote:

<non-relevant stuff snipped>
> I won't bother trying to convince you of the merits of RMAN over the O/S way
> of doing things, but they are many, including inherent validation of the
> backup against corruption; no redo overhead when doing hot backups; ability
> to skip never-used blocks, and thus produce much smaller backups; ability to
> recover block-by-block instead of data file by data file (if you've got 9i)

Ahhhh.. I see the Rdb development team has been busy helping the RDMS team get their backup stuff to work correctly... :) Rdb had "page-level" restore almost 8-10 years ago now (Rdb V6)....

> whilst nevertheless keeping the rest of the data file online and open for
> business; ability to incrementalise your backup strategy; much simpler
> incomplete recovery procedures; cloning capabilities; and so on.

RMAN even decreases restore times. I have had to restore a 350GB database in a little more than 3 hours including applying all archive redo log files. (I think in an earlier post I had said this was 720GB -- this was a 350GB .. the 720GB database was another issue that I can't seem to recall.... my apologies... oh well - that's what happens when you deal with so many systems... :)

>
> It rather depends on your version, I suppose. If you've got 8.0, there are
> good reasons for sticking with the manual technique. But from 9i onwards, I
> seriously think anybody who develops new backup strategies that involve
> manual O/S-based activity, regardless of the size of their database, is (a)
> asking for trouble and (b) making work for themselves to no great benefit.
> If you see where Oracle is headed with 10g and so on, it is clear that
> manual backup/recovery methods have no real future, either.
>
> Let me put it this way. The RMAN command in 9i is "backup database;". How
> much programming do you want to do in order to achieve that result?
>
> Regards
> HJR
>
>

Michael Austin Received on Mon Jun 07 2004 - 09:38:44 CDT