I
don't have any experience with SQL*Backtrack and I do have some
experience
with
RMAN. Here are my comments:
a)
RMAN is reliable. Once you write the backup scripts, they are executed by
operations
and there no surprises. In order to
rely on those scripts, one needs to test them, especially
the recovery
part.
b)
RMAN needs a 3rd party backup software to run. Things like OmniBackup, Tivoli,
Legato or
SyncSort can be rather expensive.
RMAN doesn't write to tapes itself. RMAN delegates a
backup software contacted through
the routines from libobk.so (or libobk.dll or libobk.sl) to
do its writing. To get the
"libobk.so" from you backup software vendor of choice, you generally
have to write a check. That means
that RMAN is NOT free.
c)
Before version 9, RMAN was arcane and hard to learn. Thanks to Robert Freeman,
it is no
longer so. You can learn how to
configure and use RMAN and you can find a decent book
to learn RMAN from. It's not very
hard and it's fairly logical. One reading of the books suffices
for a good general
understanding.
d)
Quality of the software: RMAN leaves a lot to be desired. Its biggest drawback
is the fact that
it doesn't do any coordination with
the underlying backup catalog. In other words, you can
happily
declare backup obsolete in RMAN and
Legato will not know anything about it and vice versa.
You can even delete backup in Legato
and reuse the tape while RMAN knows nothing about it.
On the other hand, RMAN, in
contrast to all other methods, does not put tablespaces into
the
backup mode, thus generating
floods of redo archives. RMAN doesn't backup data blocks that
have never been used ("behind
the watermark blocks"), which is great if you have a fresh
new
datafile which was added to
the tablespace just in case something might run out of
space.
e) Personnel. Despite the certification process,
it is not always easy to find a trained personnel
which knows how to use it and
how to recover the database. I consider the ability to
recover
the database a basis for
someone to call himself/herself a DBA. You would be surprised
how
many people which claim that
title do not know how to recover the database. Even smaller number
knows how to use
RMAN.
f) I would suggest Jared Still, Cary
Millsap, Rachel Carmichael, Jonathan Lewis, Wolfgang Breitling,
Steve Adams, Gaja V., Arup Nanda,
Kirti Deshpande and Anjo Kolk to start the Oracle List
certification
process. I would trust
that one more then the OCP. I apologize to anyone who I
might have forgotten.
Mladen Gogala
|
Title: Message
- RMAN & SQL Backtrack Smith, Ron L.
- RE: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Vergara, Michael (TEM)
- RE: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Stephane Paquette
- Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Gogala, Mladen
- Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Arup Nanda
- Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Ruth Gramolini
- Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Ron Rogers
- Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack AK
- RE: RMAN & SQL Backtrack DENNIS WILLIAMS
- RE: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Kirtikumar Deshpande
- Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Arup Nanda
- RE: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Gogala, Mladen
- Re: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Ruth Gramolini
- RE: RMAN & SQL Backtrack Gogala, Mladen