Help with netbackup business copy and rman

[Dave Walley]

Hi. I am looking for information if anybody has experience of using Netbackup, Business Copy and RMAN. My client is keen to use Netbackup but we currently use business copy for speed purposes for our Oracle databases. But my understanding is that Oracle has to be mounted to use rman to do the backup. Can anybody advise if it is possible to use this set of products? Thanks Dave

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Dave,

rman is a tool that ships with oracle for backups. It can make good backups of the database whether its running or not.

cold - database down
hot - database up, hopefully the state backup mode, but not required. rman can issue a database checkpoint to get a good hot backup.

netbackup integrates with rman to do its backups. I've used it before. The results are solid if not exciting. rman programming is a dark art, but netbackup does it for you.

SEP

[Dave Walley]

Stephen I have experience of using RMAN, the issue I have is that we use Business copy with the database down for speed purposes and I wonder how if RMAN and netbackup can we used with the business copy utility. Thanks for your reply.

[Ben Dehner]

I haven't used Business copy, but I have used Netbackup and rman quite a bit. These tools all do different things, and they don't really integrate into a single cohesive unit. You have to decide what you
are trying to do, and pick the tool(s) best suited.

Rman requires the database to be at least mounted; however, the database can be open for normal transactions. Using Rman + netbackup oracle agent allows you to take live database backups with no downtime. The database has to be running in archivelog mode for this to work, so you also need to run rman backups to clean out the archive logs before so they don't fill up the disk. You can then use rman to restore the database, or restore to a clone database for testing/development. Rman and Business copy do not directly integrate because, at the heart of it, rman requires a media management library, and that isn't what BC does.

Business Copy, on the other hand, plays at the file system level. You don't have to take the database down completely before doing the copy; you do need to do an 'alter database begin backup' to quiescse all of the data files before taking the copy. (Down'ing the database is the safest way to insure consistency, though.) Once you have the copy, you can do either a flat-file backup, or use the copy to build a secondary database. In this case, restores have to be done at the file level, and then you need to go back in as DBA and get the database running. But, in general, you don't have to mess around with tapes because you've already got the files on disk.

How you arrange things depends on your requirements. Having BC gives you the capability for a near-instant restore, since you already have the files on disk. Using RMAN gives you the capability to restore to any point in time from backups, as long as the media is available. Doing point-in-time is possible with BC-type backups, but difficult because now you have to manually track the archive log media.

I hope this helps a bit.

Ben