Re: Database accidentally left in backup mode

It's a different kind of snapshot, one specific to Amazon's EC2 hosting 
service.  You have a virtual disk drive and use their API tools to take a 
snapshot of it, which is the standard way of doing backups.  However, if the 
database isn't in hot backup mode the snapshot of those files is useless.  Yes, 
I can and do back it up in other ways as well, but since I'm making the 
snapshots and paying for the storage anyway, I wanted them to be usable.  It 
has been very handy when setting up instances for testing to be able to clone a 
new volume from a snapshot;  I bring up Oracle on the new volume, issue the 
"end backup" command, restart Oracle (not sure why this is needed but it seems 
to be) and away I go.  I couldn't restore any other kind of backup that fast.

janine

On Mar 16, 2010, at 8:56 AM, Guillermo Alan Bort wrote:

> That is also possible using a physical standby database (or dataguard). For 
> the most critical databases we have a RAC and a standby DB. Backups are taken 
> from the standby db (we have at most 15 minutes of delay).
> Alan.-
> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Harel Safra <harel.safra@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 16/03/2010 02:46, Guillermo Alan Bort wrote:
> You know... I am amazed when I see a 9i database backed up with 'begin/end'. 
> An 11g? I mean... come on! RMAN is very easy to set up for a disk backup. A 
> bit more difficult if a MML is involved, but that's about it. You can get 
> very complicated if you want to, but in general it's fairly simple. And you 
> wouldn't have hit this little problem ;-)
> 
> Your forgetting that the OP wanted to take a storage snapshot of his 
> database. The only supported way to do that is to shut down the database or 
> put it in backup mode.
> 
> RMAN is fine if you want your backups to run on your production servers. If 
> you want to offload backups to a backup server you need to move the data 
> there, usually using split mirror backups (snap/clone/BCV/...) of the 
> database that are done with alter database begin/end backup.
> 
> Harel Safra
> 

---
Janine Sisk
President/CEO of furfly, LLC
503-693-6407

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