Hi,
I've been testing different methods and I'd like to have some advice. I want to perform a cold backup once a week on the Oracle DB, and put it on tape. I'm using EMC Networker for backup software, and I am not too at ease with the fact of doing eveything with Networker, because if there is a problem with the backup, the Oracle DB might not come up after the backup run.
So I thought of using disk-based backup. I've tried scp'ing the files directly to my backup server, but the operation is too long (120 min). I tried generating a tar.gz directly to my backup server via SSH. A decent 40 minutes, using mgzip (multi-thread gzip), 70 Gigs. 120 minutes for a tar.bz2, using pbzip2 (parralel bzip2) (54 Gigs). A tar sent directly to my backup server is quite huge (318 Gigs). It is then taken to tape on the regular nightly backup.
My concerns are:
- Time needed to perform backup (downtime). - Time needed to do a recovery.
For the backup, sending a tar.gz directly to the backup server seems to be the best option. However, since I want to minimize the time needed to perform a recovery, I'd like to have raw files on tape, not in a tarball and not compressed (the tape is compressing anyway).
Up to now, I've been quite disappointed by the speed at which my backup server can decompress and untar, and this server has quite good hardware. When I use iostat -x, I find that the %util of the device is averaging 80%.
Here is the hardware involved:
Oracle Server:
HP Proliant 380DL + MSA70 16 GB ram 2 x Quad-core Xeons E5345 2.33 Ghz 9 RAID 10 volumes on 32 72G, 15K rpm SAS disks 1X Smart Array P400 w/512 MB BBU 1X Smart Array P800 w/512 MB BBU
Database Server
HP Proliant 360DL 2 x Quad-core Xeons E5345 2.33 Ghz 1 RAID 5 volume on 6 146 GB, 10K rpm SAS disks 1X Smart Array P400 w/512 MB BBU
Any help or suggestions welcome.
Regards,
Ugo
Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Hi,
I've been testing different methods and I'd like to have some advice. I want to perform a cold backup once a week on the Oracle DB, and put it on tape. I'm using EMC Networker for backup software, and I am not too at ease with the fact of doing eveything with Networker, because if there is a problem with the backup, the Oracle DB might not come up after the backup run.
What version and edition of Oracle?
Use RMAN, that's what it's there for. You can backup online, or offline, full or incremental.
At my last company we ran Oracle 10gR2 standard edition connected to a small fiber channel SAN. I wrote a script that put the tables on the primary server in hotbackup mode, then snapshotted the Oracle volumes, and mounted the snapshots onto a virtual machine that was running software iSCSI. From there a job kicked off and ran RMAN to backup the database.
Prior to that we ran enterprise edition and was able to run RMAN directly from the physical standby server. With standard edition you can't do that.
The migration from Oracle EE to Oracle SE probably paid for the SAN in itself let alone the massive increases in productivity gained by the flexibility of a centralized storage system(copying production data went from ~2 days to about 1 hour, copying data to reporting database went from ~8 hours to ~10 minutes).
You can also run RMAN against the primary system as well(any edition I believe), though I didn't want to do that as it'd impact performance.
nate
nate a écrit :
Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Hi,
I've been testing different methods and I'd like to have some advice. I want to perform a cold backup once a week on the Oracle DB, and put it on tape. I'm using EMC Networker for backup software, and I am not too at ease with the fact of doing eveything with Networker, because if there is a problem with the backup, the Oracle DB might not come up after the backup run.
What version and edition of Oracle?
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.x.x.x - 64bit Production With the Partitioning and Data Mining options
Use RMAN, that's what it's there for. You can backup online, or offline, full or incremental.
Well, we only use one main oracle server... the DBA says it is not worth the additionnal overhead. I'm no Oracle guru.
At my last company we ran Oracle 10gR2 standard edition connected to a small fiber channel SAN. I wrote a script that put the tables on the primary server in hotbackup mode, then snapshotted the Oracle volumes, and mounted the snapshots onto a virtual machine that was running software iSCSI. From there a job kicked off and ran RMAN to backup the database.
Ok, but is that the equivalent of doing a cold backup?
Prior to that we ran enterprise edition and was able to run RMAN directly from the physical standby server. With standard edition you can't do that.
Ok
The migration from Oracle EE to Oracle SE probably paid for the SAN in itself let alone the massive increases in productivity gained by the flexibility of a centralized storage system(copying production data went from ~2 days to about 1 hour, copying data to reporting database went from ~8 hours to ~10 minutes).
You can also run RMAN against the primary system as well(any edition I believe), though I didn't want to do that as it'd impact performance.
We don't really care about the performance, as we are ok with up to about 2 hours of complete downtime per week.
Thanks,
Ugo Bellavance wrote:
nate a écrit :
Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Hi,
I've been testing different methods and I'd like to have some advice. I want to perform a cold backup once a week on the Oracle DB, and put it on tape. I'm using EMC Networker for backup software, and I am not too at ease with the fact of doing eveything with Networker, because if there is a problem with the backup, the Oracle DB might not come up after the backup run.
What version and edition of Oracle?
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.x.x.x - 64bit Production With the Partitioning and Data Mining options
Use RMAN, that's what it's there for. You can backup online, or offline, full or incremental.
Well, we only use one main oracle server... the DBA says it is not worth the additionnal overhead. I'm no Oracle guru.
At my last company we ran Oracle 10gR2 standard edition connected to a small fiber channel SAN. I wrote a script that put the tables on the primary server in hotbackup mode, then snapshotted the Oracle volumes, and mounted the snapshots onto a virtual machine that was running software iSCSI. From there a job kicked off and ran RMAN to backup the database.
Ok, but is that the equivalent of doing a cold backup?
That is enough to restore from a blank database.
Since your using enterprise edition, you can even adjust the number of workers that RMAN uses(increases/decreases throughput assuming your not totally I/O bound) to throttle it.
The upside with RMAN is you can backup without downtime(though depending on size of the DB you probably can't backup without some sort of impact to the primary). And I believe it's the only really truly supported method of backing up an Oracle DB. (data pump has it's problems and backing up raw data files is questionable as well).
I haven't gone through it but this looks informative: http://blogs.oracle.com/AlejandroVargas/gems/RmanHandsOn.pdf
nate
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nate -
Ugo Bellavance