student question: incremental backups (level 0 and level 1)

Hi

so far my oracle experience has been on 8i with only PL/SQL development on 9 and later.

I'm just going through some questions in preparation for a 10g Admin 1 exam and find (among others) a question for which the answer seems to be less than right. Of course I can simply memorize the answer, but in the interests of developing knowledge (rather than simply passing exams) I thought I'd seek some suggestions here.

The question poses: You perform differential incremental level 1 backups of your database on each working day and level 0 backups on Sundays. which two statements are true about the differential incremental backups.

the answer I have issue with is: the backup performed on sundays contains all the blocks that have everbeen used in the database.

I would have thought that it is possible for blocks to be used and then become free, these blocks should then not need backing up ... no?? I'd have thought it was also possible that eventually (despite being used and freed) this could eventually encompas every block in a datafile.

thus the word EVER seems to be making this a wrong answer (which it is not according to my review software).

I'd be happy to learn what I've overlooked on this ... thanks :-)

See Ya
(when bandwidth gets better ;-)

Chris Eastwood
Photographer, Programmer Motorcyclist and dingbat blog: http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/

please remove undies for reply Received on Wed Jun 25 2008 - 04:58:02 CDT