Hot Backups

To: David Crowson from Amoco

Are we talking about Oracle's Hot Backups where the machine operates on a 24 hour schedule.

You say the following:

>No. Hot Backups are the only way to perform PIT recovery.

According to the articles I have read, Hot Backups are the only form of recovery where archiving is turned on the DOESN'T provide PIT recovery. Maybe the articles are incorrect. They say the database must be restored to a consistent state i.e. all tablespaces must have the same checkpoint id... to me this means that you cannot restore an database to 2pm, if it is now 6pm. n.b a critical table was accidentally dropped at 2pm, I have NO WAY of recovering to it.

I think you mean where you take a full cold backup and then run with archiving.
This definitely provides PIT Recovery.

Have you ever had a corrupted table in an Oracle Database? How do you get an early warning of such an event.... EXPORT LOGS.... and of course Users saying they have a strange intermittent error. n.b. Oracle is not the only database that has table corruptions, every database I have been associated with has had similar problems at some stage, invariably caused by a hardware faults.

You also say

>No.You can use HB as the nightly backup with
 a full export to tape once a month
>or so as an extra backstop. Exports aren't really needed when using HB.

I think without nighly exports, a site is leaving itself wide open for a disaster. Two possible disaster scenarios are (1) where an individual table is corrupted, that only an export can pick up (2) where an individual table is dropped, has key rows deleted from it or has a faulty program incorrectly update rows, requiring recovery to PIT.

Any DBA who has HOT BACKUPs and NO NIGHTLY EXPORT is asking for a DISASTER.

In fact, I believe nightly exports are mandatory part of any backup/recovery strategy.

You also say

>You should read chapter 15 of the DBA guide.

Can you direct me to the paragraph that says Hot Backups DO provide point in time recovery.

Any else have any opinions?

Mark Received on Wed Nov 24 1993 - 00:35:17 CET