Cheap Cheap Database Recovery

From: pitufo <vandresv_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:20:14 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <2fb7f1ee-d120-44cc-a07b-4c59b29ab846_at_r27g2000vbp.googlegroups.com>



Hi,
Having a extremely low budget for IT, I tried to design a very cheap recovery database system without having to pay for a standby database. This is the idea:
1 -use a duplex destination for the archive logs located in a remote server (nfs mounted).
2-every 5 minutes a cron job copy one of the control files to a local disk (very fast) and from that location to the nfs mounted fs (much slower)

Why ? : I did not want to have an active copy of control files using a nfs filesystem, I am afraid of performance bottleneck because the network. But at the same time I wanted to have a pretty recent backup of the control file. The same reason why I don't do redologs in another nfs location.

Once a week I do a full backup of PRODUCTION database and copy the file (tar) to the recovery database server.

When I tried the system at first, I was able to to the following in the recovery database:
  --untar fullbackup copy and place it in the right paths.   -get the latest copy of the control file (from step 2 above) and replace all backup control files with this copy. (so n ow the dbf files are old from the full backup, and the controlfile is pretty recent).

  • sqlplus "/ as sysdba"
    -startup mount
    -recover database using backup controlfile until cancel;
    --usually it will ask me for all archive logs necessary to advance until scn on controlfiles. --cancel (when I reach the last usefull archive log file) -alter database open resetllogs;

---I tried the above successfully two or three times, so I even created the documentation for the whole process. (I wanted to give the administration a pros/cons of the method versus a standby database, or RAC solution).

But, today, as a test, I tried to duplicate the steps above and the database only takes one archive logs before telling me that media recovery is complete. I made sure that I was using a controlfile much more newer than the fullbackup datafiles.

Is not this suppose to work ?
Any help will be GREATLY appreciated. Received on Thu Feb 19 2009 - 21:20:14 CST

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