Karen, That is a very valid point. Nothing worse than having a data sync problem with an incomplete backup because of an in process multi-table transaction. One solution might be to forgo automatic locks and resort to explicit table locks. To do this you may create your won list of tables instead of relying on SYS_TABLES. With your own table list you could control the sequence of unload, store additional attributes, and commands to issue.
Jim Bentley American Celiac Society [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel: 1-504-737-3293 --- On Tue, 6/17/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Hourly Backups > To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]> > Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2008, 3:33 PM > That's the problem with backups of any kind, but > certainly magnified if > you're doing hourly backups of individual tables. I > would never trust any backup > to be 100% accurate unless it's done off-hours when no > one is on the database. > Otherwise, you could get backups of header data without the > detail data > because someone hadn't gotten to that part of the form > yet. Or you catch some > batch processing program in the middle of updating a bunch > of tables, so some > tables are updated but others aren't. > > I remember years ago pre-Windows when a client was doing > hourly backups. His > db got trashed during a power outage. We restored from an > hourly backup (it > just did an XCOPY of the entire database). They checked > whether a particular > batch program had been run against that database and > decided it hadn't > because the "batch date", which was stored in a > table, was still from the previous > day. So they ran it again and really screwed up their > data. The problem was > that the Batch Date was written to the table as the last > thing in the program, > and the outage occurred in the middle of the batch program! > > It's just "better than nothing" if you do > have a catastrophic event, but you > probably would still have to do some detective work to > figure out if you got > all the data you expected. > > Karen > > > > Dan, > > What makes the program run every hour? How do you get > it to start? > > What happens if someone is changing data in a table > when the program is > > running? > > Mike
