There are several techniques you can use to back up ORACLE with ADSM.
You can do both online and offline back up, as well as back up of
Oracle on raw devices or file system files.  Details of the techiniques
we used follow.  Please note that ADSM does not directly read raw devices
so to back up databases installed on raw devices you first need to use
an Oracle utility to back up the raw device to JFS files, or the AIX dd
command to copy the raw device to a JFS file.  Then ADSM can back up
the resultant files.

Oracle has also announced that the Oracle Parallel
Backup Utility will use the ADSM API, but this support is not available
yet.  Here are options for back up we have completed as part of
an IBM redbook we are writing:

 - Offline back up using ADSM commands of the JFS files that made
   up the database.

 - Online or offline back up one tablespace at a time using the
   Oracle command, alter tablespace, to temporarily "freeze"
   a table space so that back up can be done using ADSM commands.
   This only freezes one tablespace, so the users have access to
   the rest of the database.

 - Offline incremental back up of the redo logs for the situation
   where you don't want to back up the database everyday, but instead can
   perform forward recovery with the daily back ups of the logs.

 - Used Oracle's export utility to export either the entire db or
   a single table, and then used ADSM to back up the resultant files.
   This was done while the database was online.

 - For Oracle dbs installed on raw devices, you could use Oracle's export
   or AIX's dd, and then use ADSM to back up the resultant files.
   I'm not sure why we didn't use alter tablespace for the raw
   device example....maybe you can't use that command on raw devices.
   I'll have to look into this.

Cyndie Behrens
408-256-6934
cbehrens AT vnet.ibm DOT com
ITSC (International Technical Support Center) - San Jose