Re: how to purge archive log records from the controlfile?

From: Holger Marzen <holger_at_marzen.de>
Date: 27 Apr 2003 20:59:29 GMT
Message-ID: <b8hgbh$ja1$3@bluebell.marzen.de>

• On Sat, 26 Apr 2003 15:37:40 +0200, Sybrand Bakker wrote:

> 
> "Holger Marzen" <holger_at_marzen.de> wrote in message
> news:b8doe8$38o$1_at_bluebell.marzen.de...

>> * On 26 Apr 2003 01:44:20 -0700, dias wrote:
>>
>> > I'm not sur that the commands you use are the correct ones.
>> >
>> > You can delete the obsolete backups (9i syntaxe) :
>> >
>> > report obsolete;
>> > delete obsolete;
>> >
>> > The crosscheck command tells you if a backup still exists on the
>> > media. If the backup was deleted (by os command), the backup is flaged
>> > as expired, then you can delete it (9i syntaxe):
>> >
>> > crosscheck backup of archivelog until time 'SYSDATE-60';
>> > delete expired archivelog ...;
>>
>> These commands work in v8, too. But they mark the records in the control
>> files as deleted, they don't remove them.

> 
> That's just the way it works. If you don't want to buy that, address your
> concerns by submitting an iTar, and please stop complaining here.

Why so aggressive? My answer was no complaint. I just clarified that dias misunderstood my problem. Using the "obsolete" functions is not what I want.

The last backup and the archived logfiles are always kept on disk (on a fileserver). Older backups and archive logs are backupped to tape with our central backup tool and then deleted from disk. If I use "delete obsolete" then the information about older backups in the control files is (marked as) deleted, so I cannot restore them (if the customer requests it) with rman although they are still on tape. Why should I throw away any information that might be needed? So I just want to mark very old backups and logs as deleted. This works.

But it seems that no-one can tell me a working solution for my growing controlfiles. Any working system that marks records as deleted instead of actually deleting them has some kind of reorganization tool to actually purge these records or at least a means to reuse them. In the next weeks I'll watch the controlfiles. If they don't grow anymore, then the "deleted" records will be reused (although I couldn't find any information about that). If they still grow then I'll probably have to reorganize them by re-creating them (losing all the informations about backups and archived logs -- very bad). Trying to list all backups on a 4-processor Sun E3500 and getting no results after more than a hour is no feature of a healthy system. Deleting old records of backups and logs is no problem with db2, so it should be no problem with Oracle either. But it seems that it *is* a problem.

Any help is really appreciated. Received on Sun Apr 27 2003 - 15:59:29 CDT