My point for purposes of this discussion is that it is possible to get good, recoverable backups of a database even if it is run in NOARCHIVELOG mode. This may be obvious and well-known to you all, but I mentioned it because it was not being done in the case under discussion.
Cheers, Lisa
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 04:22 PM, Daniel Hagerty wrote:
Lisa Koch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
I was once Unix admin for a company that did Oracle front-end development. We ran Oracle in NOARCHIVELOG mode too. But we shut it down regularly for cold backups.
If you stop the Oracle "listeners" before your backup and start them
again afterward, you can get perfectly useable backups. I have
recovered from such backups many times without problems (we were always
When you write threaded code but don't worry about locking between the threads, the code will work *almost* every time.
You're doing the same thing with your backups. It might work almost every time. In my mind, that's not a good property for disaster recovery.
Even if you shut down the listener, e.g. oracle *might* decide to schedule a checkpoint in the middle of your backup. At which point you lose; if you are moving bits before and after they will reflect different SCNs. I'd imagine there are even situations where oracle can't detect a problem; you just get corrupted data at logical layer. Oops.
Oracle doesn't even like to make promises about databases backed up during "alter database suspend"; at least in that case your gambling with the oracle's IO layer being quiescent.
Just because something works doesn't mean it will work when you actually need it. As someone else said, it's clear that you could actually do the right thing here. Why gamble against stacked odds?
Dr. Lisa K. Koch Asst. Dean for Educational and Computer Technology College of Engineering, Northeastern University 230 Snell Eng. Ctr, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115 [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Phone: 617-373-4430 * Fax: 617-373-8504
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