Popped over from c.d.informix

Greetings,

I'm just popping over from my normal comp.databases.informix habitat to ask a couple of questions about Oracle:

1. do Oracle DBAs make use of raw partitions on disk rather than filesystems? informix DBAs practically live in raw partitions.

		      performance - perhaps oracle runs okay working
		      within the unix file hierarchy...)

2) please tell me that oracle 7.1 or 8.0 (whatever) will have a clean

   online backup. no "fuzzy" stuff. the possibility of incremental    backups.

   no? if one limits themselves to operating system backups (which is

        the preferred method, ostensibly), then an incremental is not
	possible.  sure, cpio can do incremental but only by copying
	WHOLE FILES where files have had changes.  that, in the eyes of
	the data base, is not an incremental backup.  and we're not much
	better off using the export facility, which states, "you should
	have file offline during the export".

  the point about a "clean" backup is a request for a facility that works   within the data base to supply a backup that is consistent at a certain   point in time. this is not the same as one "becoming clean" after you   apply a redo log. the right idea comes from the notion of a readconsistent    transaction. if only we could do this to backup the whole   instance. that is a clean backup.

Thanks for your comments.

-- 
Scott F. Ford, Data Base Administrator	|  sford_at_wvus.org                      
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