On 11/24/06, mkiles <mikekiles at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am going through the NetBackup for Oracle Admin
> guide, it mentions that you can have multiple
> schedules in the policy with different retention
> periods. That is you can have a FULL backup schedule
> with retention period of 1 year and an INCREMENTAL
> backup schedule with retention of 1 month.
>
> This may be new in NBU 6, but I remeber in NBU 5.x,
> the retention period that was always used was that of
> Default-Application-Backup schedule.
>
> So in my NBU 5.0 environment, I have ONE policy for
> FULL Oracle backup with 1 year retention and ONE
> Oracle policy for INCREMENTAL backups with 1 month
> retention. Each policy has 2 schedules in it, one of
> those is Default-Application-Backup schedule, both
> schedule have same retntion period, i.e. for FULL
> Backup policy retention period for both schedules is 1
> year and for INCREMENTAL policy retention period for
> both schedules is 1 month.
>
> So my question is, is it the same behaviour in NBU 6.0
> for Oracle and SQL backups, or it has changed.

I'm familiar with NB 5.1, where there are 2 kinds of Oracle schedules:
"Automatic" and "Application".
- Automatic schedules simply act as triggers and execute the RMAN
script on the client.
- Application schedules receive the incoming datastream(s) generated
by the RMAN script.

If the incoming data stream does not specify an "Application" schedule
(by default, it doesn't), NetBackup will assign it the first schedule
that meets the following criteria:
- in the specified policy (by default this is sent)
- open window

You can easily set the window so you get incrementals to be retained
for a different time period than the fulls, but you can't
differentiate between backups done at the same time of the week, but
with different retentions. (weekly/monthly/yearly for instance)

The retention level of the Automatic backup schedule is not useful.
It specifies how long to keep record of the fact that an Automatic
backup schedule was triggered.  The retention level of the incoming
data is set by the schedule used to receive the incoming data stream.

Turn up logging for bphdb and you will see which variables get passed
to the RMAN script.
# NB_ORA_PC_SCHED is the name of the AUTO schedule.
# NB_ORA_SCHED is the name of the APP schedule.

Using these variables, you can have the RMAN script pick which
Application Backup schedule to use.  This will let you avoid using
multiple policies to backup one Oracle server.
You can even skip the AUTO schedule and use your own timer/scheduler
to trigger the RMAN script whenever you want.

You send the variables back to NetBackup like this:
...
 ALLOCATE CHANNEL ch00 TYPE 'SBT_TAPE';
SEND 'NB_ORA_SCHED=$NB_ORA_SCHED';
BACKUP
...

This technique does not apply to MS-SQL backups (w/ NB 5.1) since they
use a different mechanism to send data to NetBackup.

I don't know how this applies to NB 6.x.

Austin