RE: Backup on standby database

Designing RECOVERY usefully requires knowing the topology and geography of your operational locations and the business goals of business continuation in a variety of scenarios with management input on which sorts of outages and data losses cost the most per unit time (often supra-linear as elapsed time of outage increases).  

You don’t want to be in a situation where, say, a single earthquake puts a global network of build to order manufacturing plants out of business for a couple weeks. Neither do you want to invest in supporting that sort of recovery and business continuation if your IT operation is in a single brick and mortar retail store. Those are probably the polar cases, and if Jan Carel were handy he’d probably mention that it is unacceptable for a fire in the building holding your primary database to take out an air traffic control system.  

Avoiding a little contention for i/o on the primary machine to get routine backups is usually a smart idea as Howard notes below, and you can usually work out that being no hindrance to recovery. You do have to work it through exactly when you write your playbook for various RECOVERY scenarios. Backups are an ingredient of RECOVERY. The goal is RECOVERY in accordance with business requirements with an acceptable level of discomfiture to normal operations.  

With the enormity of a lot of systems, full reloads tend to be incompatible with recovery goals. Mladen has some practical descriptions of this on this list server, but I cannot remember the vintage. Getting the business to consider the insurance value of infrastructure and software purchased to meet recovery requirements often either opens the management wallet or causes them to realize their goals are incompatible with money available. If that conversation does not take place, the incumbent DBA may discover that having a valid backup is not career protection.  

Good luck,  

mwf  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Pap Sent: Monday, May 03, 2021 11:37 AM
To: Howard Latham
Cc: Oracle L
Subject: Re: Backup on standby database  

Thank You. Our infra team is responsible for backup , stating that running backup on primary is followed as a standard practice in our case. So wondering if there exists any possible negative side of switching/running the backup to DR side. Not fully clear though, but just thinking around that in case of backup running on DR side. If a real disaster happens to either side, will that cause any concern? or say while the lag is bigger between primary and DR and one of the sides(say DR on which backup is taking place) crashed , will that pose a threat for recovery?  

Regards

Pap  

On Mon, May 3, 2021 at 1:31 AM Howard Latham <howard.latham_at_gmail.com> wrote:

We do it as standard. Keeps the impact down.  

Best Wishes  

Howard A. Latham    

On Sun, 2 May 2021 at 20:48, Pap <oracle.developer35_at_gmail.com> wrote:

We are using RMAN - ZDLRA for oracle database backup. We are running it currently on Primary database and it runs for around 2hrs daily. We see during the backup window there is higher IO utilisation and due to that sometimes application query sees variable execution time.  

We do have dataguard configured standby database for disaster recovery so want to know from experts if it's advisable to run backup on standby side? Or does it have any down side?  

Regards

Pap

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