Transportable Tablespaces as backup?

Has anyone used transportable tablespaces as a special backup method?

Periodically I get a request from our applications people to "backup these tables before we run this year-end program so if something goes wrong we can reset everything." And the attention-getter is "if we can't recover, you won't get paid again."

• Usually nothing goes wrong (thankfully).
• We do full backups, obviously, but there are unpleasant consequences for rolling back an enterprise-scale database. The system goes back for everyone. Obviously we can do a TSPITR over on a test system, but I don't like to rely on that alone.
• Export works great for small to medium size tables.
• Export of large tables is fine, but my experience says that importing a really large table can take a LOOONG time, a frightening prospect during an emergency.
• It occurs to me that making the tablespace read-only and performing a transportable "export" should work great. These large tables are in their own tablespace. The application doesn't any RI in Oracle.
• Recovery should be a matter of dropping the existing tablespace, copying the backup datafile off tape, running the import procedure, and making the tablespace read-write. Much faster than the true import.

Am I missing something? I plan to try this on a test system to make sure I have the right syntax.

Dennis Williams
DBA, 40%OCP
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

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Author: DENNIS WILLIAMS
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