We have looked at this some time ago and actually had received form Oracle the specs for the APIs, but as Kern pointed out, there are several issues with integrating Bacula with RMAN:
1. As Kern said below, RMAN wants to initiate the backups and drive them for that matter, "talking" to media manager through a dynamic library that media manager has to provide. This goes against the architecture of Bacula where client is not able to initiate the backup. I guess there might be some workarounds like the backup will be initated by Director, which I turn will contact the client and it will actually run RMAN. I actually think that some or event most other backup products that have RMAN plugins do it that way. 2. Licensing/distribution . Since Oracle's stuff is proprietary it will not be possible to distribute the source code for the "Oracle plugin" or at least not the code for libobk.so that will need to be there. This means that only the binaries can be distributed and again I am not sure if there will be any problem using a closed source binary with Bacula from the licensing perspective. And maintaining binaries for all of the possible platforms might not be the easiest thing :) Generally I want to say that our company is very much interested in getting this off the ground and implemented and we are open to providing different kind of support to this - from financial to being involved in talks with Oracle as well providing resources for testing the plugin once it is developed. We do use Bacula for ourselves as well as a number of clients where Oracle needs to be backed up and it would be great to have an Oracle plugin. Best regards, Paul Tabashov Pontis Corporation Chief Technology Officer p. 416-925-7871 f. 416-946-1923 http://www.pontis.biz -----Original Message----- From: Kern Sibbald [mailto:k...@sibbald.com] Sent: Friday, August 26, 2011 12:56 AM To: Sebastian Herbszt Cc: bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Bacula-devel] Bacula Oracle MML Hello Sebastian, There are several problems in interfacing Bacula to Oracle: 1. One is that the Oracle "APIs" are proprietary, which will probably require some license exception to interface to them. 2. Oracle apparently charges a good deal of money to be able to get access to these "APIs". We haven't yet looked at this in detail yet, so I may be wrong. Now that Bacula Systems is interested in an Oracle interface, the cost is probably manageable where as for the Bacula project it is not. 3. Oracle (actually RMAN) wants to be in control of everything, if you implement Backup/Restore the way Oracle recommends. This is in some senses a conflict with Bacula which wants to be in control of everything. I think there are plenty of ways to resolve the problems but until we have access to and understand the interfaces (APIs) as Eric has suggested, there is not a lot we can do. Perhaps you have such access, which would be interesting :-) Best regards, Kern On 08/25/2011 10:05 PM, Sebastian Herbszt wrote: > I am trying to estimate the effort required to create an Oracle MML which can > interact with Bacula. > Unfortunatelly i am unsure about its design: > > Backups are taken with RMAN and the MML has to connect to Bacula. According > to the "Projects" > file [1] client initiated backups aren't supported, so the MML has to > connect to the director. Once connected it will have to run a job. The > FD likely needs a plugin to interact with the MML (data and control path). > > How can the MML communicate its intentions to Bacula? It doesn't seem to fit > into a "job" approach. > > [1] http://www.bacula.org/git/cgit.cgi/bacula/tree/bacula/projects > > Sebastian > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > -------- EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K > The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to > 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. > Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Bacula-devel mailing list > Bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list Bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list Bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
