Backup/recovery

[Kurt Greener]

Looking for opinions on ways to recover or do stand by of our Oracle database system. We have identical rp7410 hp-ux 11.11 boxes today that we have gotten by with fbackup to tape and doing manual recoveries to the second box and using it as a test instance. The last restore took 4.5 hours. The powers to be want options to shorten that time. Our Oracle DB is 7.3.4. Is anyone using Oracle Parallel server with that version?

[Fabian Briseño]

Hello kurt.
If by standby you mean a standby database you would need oracle DB version 8.1.7.4 and above, I think.

And for backup and recovery you could use Omniback, or dataprotector which is a newer version of Omniback.

I also have heard that Rman is also for backing up oracle databases

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Kurt,

Options.

1) Use OnlineJFS snapshots. You down the database, create a logical volume for new writes, bring the database back up. When you remove the logical volume all writes go into the original logical volume. Slick, 1-2 minutes of downtime per day.
2) Mirror split, same principle. Down the database, split the mirror bring it back up. Mount the newly minted split volume and back it up. Cold. Very reliable. After backup merge the split volume back into the mirror.
3) As stated rman.
4) Hot backup with the database in backup mode.

Of course in general since your database is not supported this is a risky operation and platform to work with.

SEP