Re: Cold backup and Exp utility

"Jimmy Kan" <jimkan_at_earthlink.net> wrote in message news:Pt6u6.16574$Im6.1731302_at_newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
> Hi,
> A DBA setup a full Exp to run every night, once that is done the system
 will
> shutdown the oracle and do a cold backup. Since we are doing a cold backup
> every night, is it necessary to run the Exp utility? these two process
 takes
> 9 hours all together.
> Thanks
>
>

They serve 2 completely different purposes. Exp is a *logical* backup.
The cold backup is a physical one.
The latter one is used for disaster recovery (hardware failure, power dips), the former one to prevent havoc when users accidentally drop a table, or delete some rows.
If you have a disaster and you only have an export, you will deeply regret that, as you will be forced to recreate the database. If you deleted 32 rows from a 3 million row table and you don't have an export, you will deeply regret that too, as you will be forced to juggle with manual point in time recovery.
In short: you need them *both* and you would better try to tune the export and maybe the cold backup.

Hth,

Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA Received on Wed Mar 21 2001 - 17:56:03 CST