There is a very excellent Redbook called "Using ADSM to Backup
Databases." From that book, I was able to put together some shell
scripts (since rewritten in Perl) to do online backups of our
databases. Our databases are small enough, and we are on a
platform for which IBM does not provide a Connect Agent, so we
decided to go with this "lo-tech" form of database backups.

Having just successfully restored a production instance this
morning following a disk failure, I can state with confidence
that this method works. It's also cheap, and has the benefit of
incurring zero downtime to take backups.

 -- Tom

Thomas A. La Porte
DreamWorks Feature Animation
tlaporte AT anim.dreamworks DOT com


On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Kelly, Patrick C. wrote:

>Hi everybody,
>
>I am looking for some suggestions on backing up Oracle databases using
ADSM.
>The way we do it now, is to shutdown the database nightly and do a cold
>backup. Works good but causes about 3hrs of downtime. What I would like to
>do is shut the database down for a cold backkup weekly and then backup the
>archive logs periodically throughout the week.
>
>Has anyone had experience doing this? More importantly has anyone had
>success recovering from this type of backup. I have seen how fussy Oracle
>can be after a restore and I need to have my bases covered.
>
>Thanks in advance
>Pat Kelly
>pkelly AT wcb.state.nd DOT us
>