I need one opinion and one answer

Opinions Please

   I'm monitoring a group of databases running on Novell servers. Each server has two disks (each with its own controller) which hold mirrored control files and mirrored online redo logs. Everything else goes on the server's raid5 setup - including the archived redo logs. This means I have no control over which disks hold data, indexes, archived logs etc.

    Normally I'd want to see the archived redo logs separate from the data files (and even mirrored), but I don't know enough about raid5 to tell whether we're protected against disk failure. The company takes a complete cold backup of each database every night. But they say they can't afford to lose part of a day's data if we crash after some of the redo logs have been archived. Is this a danger or does raid5 protect us?

Question
  For each database the init.ora file sets archiving on and sets a destination for the archived redo logs. I can look at the alert log and see that log switches take place with some regularity on each database. When I do a backup controlfile to trace I see that nine of the databases have archivemode set to yes and one has it set to no. The one that has it set to no is not producing any archived redo logs. Since each database is shut down, backed up and started again the following morning, and since each init.ora sets archiving on, how or why does the one database not archive the logs? Where is the setting being overridden?

Thanks,
Van Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 17:24:31 CST