[CentOS] Backup methods for an Oracle DB

Mon Jan 26 20:10:52 UTC 2009
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

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