Re: How to apply archive logs on an cold backup

[snipped]
>
> > > I will let the readers make the
> > > judgment.
> >
> > I hope they will.
> >
> > And as they do so, I am sure they will note that I have not been alone in
> > criticising the content of your post.
> >
>
> Reasonable critics are welcome.

I am a reader and I have just performed a quick poll with all the DBAs in my office

Q: In response to the question "How to apply archive logs on an cold backup", who gave the most suitable answer?

The results are

Howard J Rogers     100%
Bob Jones             0%

I think that is conclusive.
The actual votes collected are (HJR 1, BJ 0).

I have been a DBA for a while now, and I have a complaint to make. There is too much misinformation posted especially about backup and recovery.

For me it has always been a part of my skill set that I have been unhappy with, until recently. When I was learning the DBA trade, my manager was a great believer that knowledge was power, and by gosh he didn't want to lose that power! Consequently we were forbidden from practising anything where we could learn more than our "mentor", this included database recovery.

A couple of companies, copious reading and a few local installations of Oracle later (plus a couple of recoveries), things are improving.

However, the real change in my fortune is due to the clear and concise posts about backups and recovery I have read on this group, and those of one poster in particular.

A lot of posts about recovery are wrong, perhaps not in a certain scenario, but when
you are trying to get to grips with the concepts these posts knock you off track. "Why is he doing that type recovery?" back to the books… "That doesn't make sense. But he is posting on comp.databases.oracle.server so he MUST know what he is talking about!" This is why it is important to get the details correct, at any level. There is no point in posting an answer, and then having to qualify it in layer posts "Well if it was that, and you had lost this, and you had deleted that, and it was the third Thursday of the month, and your cat had just coughed up a fur ball, then my post WOULD have been correct, so I'm right and you're wrong!"

We who are learning have to trust what is written. And in Howard J Rogers we have someone who cuts through the carp of backup and recovery. Explains in clear and concise ways why we do a recovery in a certain way, what files we need, the steps we need to follow and where other posters are incorrect. However, the ego level of DBAs is often so high that to be told your post is incorrect is tantamount to a declaration of war.

I would like to thank Howard for helping me to revisit backup and recovery with a new and clear head.

Regards
Stuart Received on Thu Sep 02 2004 - 05:22:00 CDT