Restore Database Question (After Server reinstall).

Hello all,

Specs Oracle 9.2.0.4.0 WIN 2K (SP3), Dual CPU 1 GB RAM

Here is a quick scenario of what I am dealing with. First I should mention (after ducking) that I am more of an MSSQL DBA Than an Oracle DBA, but necessity requires several hats in small shops.

We are a small software company that recently released an Oracle backend for our product. The application installs into its own tablespace with its own schema. A potential customer of ours has been evaluating the software for the last month or so. About a week ago the application stopped working through no fault of the back end. It appears to be a problem in the middle tier of our application (IIS COM+ on WIN 2K) specifically in MSXML. We have tried everything to repair the problem but finally chalked it up to MS and punted. The customer is rebuilding the machine from scratch and we are going to reinstall the application. The only problem is that since this was an evaluation setup it was not put on a production server so all three of our tiers were on this same machine.

I have spent the last few days devouring the RMAN Docs and I think I have a solution for their problem, but wanted to seek advice on its advisability.

We have made full backups of the database using RMAN, and we have set the Controlfile AUTOBACKUP ON. We moved all of these files to a safe network location. We have also moved the entire Oracle folder structure to a networked location as well. Finally we made a full backup of the server just in case so we can at least restore the old installation and retrieve things I have overlooked in this go through.

Fortunately the Servers are built in a regulated environment and the installation is documented in SOPs. So we are fairly confident we will get an almost identical installation.

Here are the steps that I am going to suggest to this user.

1. Reinstall all software including Oracle and our application on the server.
2. Verify that the application is up and running and the user can connect.
3. Reconfigure RMAN to use the same settings we were using (Channels Parallelism etc)
4. Copy backup information from the network to the new server.
5. Restore the Backed up control file we have from the previous install
6. Restore the database from the back up sets we created from the old machine.

The New Oracle Server will have the same name and configuration as the old server had (all governed by users SOPs), but I am assuming it will have a different DBID Which may cause problems???

Am I over thinking these issues?
Can you just copy the old data files over the new ones? I wouldn't think so.
Am I missing anything that might prevent this method from succeeding? Did I forget anything in this post that would help you asses my plan or the situation?

Like I said I am relatively new to the Oracle world and our Oracle "guru" is no longer with us. I have read as much of the documentation AS I could on this subject in the time I had (Actually this has already taken too long), and I think I have a good plan, but no first hand experience to back it up. So any constructive suggestions and posts would be very welcome. Remarks regarding Microsoft or my skill on the subject are already understood and I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't have to, so please leave those out.

After the server was reformatted I did find the EXP/IMP Stuff but to use that we would have to restore the old server and start all over. The end user is not willing to do that unless it is required.

Regards,
Bill Received on Thu Feb 05 2004 - 11:43:43 CST