Re: Logical log backups to non-rewind tape device

stiglich@promarkone.com wrote: > I am thinking about using a no rewind tape device name for > backing up our logical logs because whenever we have to bounce > the instance a new tape needs to be put in. Does anyone do this > sort of thing? Any possible pitfalls? Make /absolutely/ sure that you have your recovery procedure down cold before trying this. Can you access just the third logical log sequence on the tape, for instance? Do you have restoration difficulties? How about what happens when the tape device is full before Informix thinks it should be? Note: We thought about this, and these are some of the questions we asked. There's nothing physically to stop you doing this, but you have to evaluate the new behaviour and decide for yourself if its worth it. Other note: I believe (not sure) that this drives your continuous logging into the unsupported realm (as do most things, like running it from a script). Caveat emptor. Sidebar: As of today, with 70-80 production instances in the field, we have yet to successfully use a continuous logging tape to restore. I should mention that we use O/S level and hardware mirroring on all dbspaces through. The one (1) time we had a catastrophic hardware failure, we ran into so many Informix bugs restoring log tapes it wasn't even funny. Combine that with the pletora of problems involved in running continuous-logging with non-technical operators (for the most part), and I'm beginning to consider recommending dropping continuous logging from our sites. Any comments out there? Has anyone else reached the same conclusion? -Richard