** HELP! a couple of "expert" questions **

From: Brad Puett <bpuett_at_interpath.com>
Date: 1996/03/22
Message-ID: <bpuett-2203962126460001_at_greenvillesc-221.interpath.net>#1/1


Everone has been so helpful to my questions, so I thought I'd take a chance and post these questions which are critical to my job ... I've been hired as a consultant, mostly to load data from old tables to a new Oracle Database ... But some questions have arisen that require DBA skills, and I don't seem to "totally" understand how to solve them ... To wit:

  1. I KNOW that if you have the ORACLE_SID and ORACLE_HOME environment variables set correctly, you can log in and do things with SQL*Plus ... I ALSO KNOW that if you have the ORACLE_SID, you can find the corresponding ORACLE_HOME by looking in the /etc/oratab file ...
      What I don't understand is once you have both variables, HOW does
          Oracle determine where your data files are?  I mean physically,
          not logically ...  What I'm trying to do is prove that I'm working
          with the correct tables in SQL*Plus, but I only know ORACLE_HOME
           and ORACLE_SID ...   I need to know which tables are "attached" to 
          these 2 variables ...  SOMEONE ELSE set up the tables (who is no
          longer with the company) and no one else there knows much about
          Oracle (they've only had it for 6 weeks!)

2)  What do most people use to back up their data base files?  Tar or export?
         I KNOW that you can use TAR to backup everything for the purposes
         of restoring all the data and structures ...  suppose you just
want a cum-
         lative backup, what do you use?   Suppose you want to ensure that, once
         you've made changes to the structure of the database (i.e. you have to 
         increase the storage size, change some keys in tables, etc.), you can
         restore the data back to the way it was (Note:  I don't mean make any
         changes that would preclude putting the data back correctly [adding new
         fields, etc.])

3)  If you happen to be an "expert" in the software package "Pointman", I have
           some other questions (mostly in how it interacts with the
database, etc. --
           nothing too technical!)

Thanks for any info you can give me!!!

-- 
Brad Puett
bpuett_at_interpath.com
Received on Fri Mar 22 1996 - 00:00:00 CET

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