Re: Database backups

Your struggle for "never, ever down" misses several important aspects.

First, a backup will only protect against data loss. It will take time to restore and recover from a backup, no matter if it is hot or cold. Even with a hot backup you may loose data when all your current redologs are destroyed.

Second, availability of 24 x 7 requires a lot more than just providing good backups. The smallest fraction of downtime is caused by physical problems - these can be protected against by measures like RAID. You will suffer more downtime from software and handling problems.

Example: you experience an Oracle bug (which is not as rare as you may suspect). Oracle support (you have a support contract, don't you?) will provide a patch or a patchset for your problem. You have to take down the instance for applying the patchset. Or you may have to upgrade your Oracle version. Again you have to take down your instance.

Martin

> Dale DeRemer wrote:
>
> We are new the the Oracle world. We want our ebusiness server to be 7x24.
> Never, ever down. Meaning... no cold backups. So, our question is this: If we
> use hot backups, (RMAN), and never take a cold backup, will we be able to
> recover from any failure. Additionally, what is the impact, or difference in
> recovery time for a system with no cold backups, vs. one with a cold backup
> done once a week, or once a month?The DB is 75GB and will grow to about 100GB
> over the next year. It will be updated in batches from our mainframe. Users
> will not update it. Thanks for your help.
Received on Wed Mar 27 2002 - 07:03:14 CST