Re: 10g recovery scenario

On Apr 12, 2005 2:57 PM, William B Ferguson <wbfergus_at_usgs.gov> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Thursday I get to purposely break my (10g) production database to test
> data recovery scenarios.
>
> Before doing it, I'll do an export of my schemas and a complete cold
> backup (just in case). I also have flashback enabled, and the scenario is
> to delete an Oracle datafile while the database is running.
>
> This is on a Windows 2003 Server box with full Veritas backups performed
> nightly of everything except the ORACLE_HOME directory (it kept killing
> Oracle backing that up, so I excluded from backups). The server has 3
> disks configured as RAID 5.

I have a couple of observations.

1. You'll have difficult deleting an Oracle datafile whilst Oracle is running you'll get "Cannot delete <DATAFILE NAME> it is being used by another person or program.
2. Your comment about killing Oracle with the backups suggests to me that your data is stored under %ORACLE_HOME%. I prefer not to do this for exactly this reason and store it under %ORACLE_BASE%\oradata Then I can exclude just that directory. Veritas does sell an Oracle agent that understands Oracle backups (though in the v7 days it was rather poor and we opted not to buy it).

I know it's REAL bad practice to do this on a production system, but this
> IS the government, and congress has passed some BS rules that we have to
> do this.
>
> Any gotcha's I should know about before relagating myself to a full
> re-install and import? Lol

I'm a little surprised that the rules don't allow for testing on a test server (though maybe you don't have funding for that). Never the less if you have a full cold backup there is no need to reinstall for your proposed test. Deleting a few random dll's out of %ORACLE_HOME%\bin might be an interesting test though :)

Fortunately, no transactions will be going on at the point of file
> deletion, so being Windows, I can try just bringing the file back from the
> Recycle Bin.
>
> Thanks.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Bill Ferguson
> U.S. Geological Survey - Minerals Information Team
> PO Box 25046, MS-750
> Denver, Colorado 80225
> Voice (303)236-8747 ext. 321 Fax (303)236-4208
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com

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