RE: Senior Oracle DBA now Learning Informix by Request

I'd have to defer to the Informix people out here who know more history than I. I've never done a cold backup with Informix......Have had to play some games at small companies with limited tape drives back in the early 90s.... but no cold backups. Still know Oracle databases that are both backed up and fully exported each night.... seems wasteful.....again could be old-thought Oracle DBAs. I do not know the birthday of Onbar, but I was using ontape for backups long before 1997 and it didn't require any scripting. I am not familiar with informix problems with checkpointing, as I haven't had any since my earliest remembrance (1989). I don't know what you mean by "recovery log tailing" so didn't know informix had that problem (what should I do to see this problem?) I am familiar with the snapshot too old error in Oracle. And I am now familiar with 100+ hours of wait time while Oracle attempts to drop a large empty tablespace (yes, an empty tablespace).... during migration from dictionary managed to locally managed. Informix has never had this issue that I know of.... seems to do internal space management quite well. I just experienced a new (for me) Oracle error this week, and it didn't start with "ORA-" which was odd, so I have to invest some time to sniff for this new error which starts with ">>>" not "ORA-". Some Oracle notes say I need to apply a patch (downtime.... ouch), some others say I need to reorg to get from "defined" locally managed to truly locally managed..... alas that puts me back in the 100+ hours waiting for an empty tablespace to drop..... -----Original Message----- From: informix-list-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:informix-list-bounces@iiug.org] On Behalf Of Mark Townsend Sent: Thursday, December 14, 2006 9:09 PM To: informix-list@iiug.org Subject: Re: Senior Oracle DBA now Learning Informix by Request Sebastian, Norma J. wrote: > Next question. > > How long has RMAN been around and trustworthy? RMAN first shipped with Oracle8 in 1997. It took a few releases to become widely used in the Oracle community. People were initially happy with their scripts > > Is RMAN advised to be housed in a separate oracle instance? Or is it > trusted to be with the instance it backs up? You mean the RMAN catalog. RMAN is just the tooling. It's horses for courses: Backing up multiple instances - have a separate Oracle RMAN catalog. Backing up a single instance (or just a few) - have the catalog local (or in fact, have no catalog at all) > > What did you do before RMAN when informix people were either using onbar> or ontape? From the little I know, and I certainly admit I know > little. (DA, you are one of the few and best Oracle people who have > helped me so no slams intended here).... > ... it seems prior to rman people had to make their own scripts to do > backups or take the DB down cold for backup. Scripted backups at the OS level, with some database commands issued via a SQL command line to either shutdown the database, or throw it into hot backup mode. Hot backup has been supported in Oracle since at least Oracle 5, long before RMAN came on the scene. RMAN is just the tooling. > > I didn't know cold backups existed before I started using Oracle. > Never did them on any version of informix I have worked with. Every database supports cold backups, as the backup is orthogonal to the database itself. Just like early versions of Oracle, early versions of the Informix engine (pre IDS) did not support hot backups. I think you will find that Oracle added hot backup capability to the database before Informix did to their engines (but I may be wrong). Hot backup and RMAN are not co-requirements, RMAN is just the tooling Oracle certainly solved the problem of checkpointing and recovery log tailing long before Informix did. (Informix still has some issues in this area even in the latest engine). > > Norma Jean Sebastian > ERP Support Administration > GIS- Enterprise Technical Services > > _______________________________________________ Informix-list mailing list Informix-list@iiug.org http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list ============================================================ The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any reproduction, dissemination or distribution of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message and deleting it from your computer. Thank you. Tellabs ============================================================