Re: Backup Tool Alternative to RMAN and BMC's SQL Backtrack

>>RMAN demands WAY TOO MUCH infrastructure to be in place to get a
>>successful recovery.

Nothing is more important to me, other than a successful recovery.

>>O7-style backups are necessary in many areas - adding a datafile to
the
>>standby, for instance. I would be suspicious of any DBA that relied
on
>>RMAN too much and was uncomfortable with ALTER TABLESPACE BEGIN
>>BACKUP.

ALTER TABLESPACE xxx BEGIN BACKUP.
is truly not a great option.
DOes that

   handle block level corruptions?
   look into incremental backups/restores?    backup the control file, spfile,archived logs ? NO.
RMAN does!.

Above all , here is the most scaring information , which gave us nightmares before. I stole the wordings of a wise man ( Tim Gorman). ----------- from an article by Tim Gorman ------- When the ALTER TABLESPACE ... BEGIN BACKUP command is issued, a global database checkpoint
occurs. This means that the current system change number (SCN) is logged to the redo log
stream in a checkpoint record, and all buffers in the Buffer Cache modified prior to that
SCN must be flushed down to the datafiles. Once the checkpoint completes, then the header
block of each datafile in the tablespace is frozen, meaning that the header will not be
updated to record the SCN of future checkpoints. However, the writing of database blocks to the body of the datafiles is not changed in
any way. During future checkpoints, while the tablespace remains in backup mode,
blocks continue to be written to the datafiles, just like normal. When the DBWR process
flushes blocks to the datafiles outside of checkpoint processing, this continues in the
datafiles belonging to the tablespace being backed up, just like normal.
Meanwhile, while this normal I/O occurs to and from the tablespace in backup mode,
some type of operating-system utility is copying the datafiles, backing them up.
This utility, which on UNIX might be the dd, cp, tar, cpio, or dump commands, is actually
backing up datafiles that are in flux. The files are being changed, as they are being saved
to backup media. To put it another way, the datafiles that are being backed up are not consistent, and in one sense of the word, are corrupted. Received on Mon Feb 28 2005 - 15:20:17 CST