VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Oracle Administrator's Guide

Managing Storage Checkpoints Prerelease 8 September 2005, 8:55am
294 VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle Administrator’s Guide
Managing Storage Checkpoints
A Storage Checkpoint is like an online backup of a database that contains a point-in-time database
image. Storage Checkpoints can later be used to restore the image of a datafile, a tablespace, or the
entire database to any earlier state recorded by the Storage Checkpoints.
VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle uses the VxDBA repository to determine the list of
tablespaces, datafiles, and file systems for Storage Checkpoint creation and removal.
For more information about Storage Checkpoints, see “Understanding Storage Checkpoints and
Storage Rollback” on page 163 and “Using Storage Checkpoints and Storage Rollback for Backup
and Restore” on page 163.
Creating a Storage Checkpoint
You have the option to create an offline, online, or instant Storage Checkpoint. If the database is
online when the Storage Checkpoint is created, VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle switches
the database to online backup mode before creating the Storage Checkpoint. Once the Storage
Checkpoint is created, VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle switches the database back to its
normal operation mode.
For the instant option, the database should be online and it can be running in either ARCHIVELOG
or NOARCHIVELOG mode. You can only roll back the entire database to an instant Storage
Checkpoint. After the rollback is complete, you need to perform Oracle database instance recovery.
Rolling the database forward is not supported; that is, you cannot apply archived redo logs.
In addition to creating a Storage Checkpoint, the GUI automatically backs up the associated control
files, initialization file, and log information. Suppose that you made a structural change to your
database, and then needed to roll back the database to a Storage Checkpoint that was created before
the structural change. The Storage Rollback would only be successful if you could also reconstruct
the database to the same structure that it was when the Storage Checkpoint was created. You can
recreate the previous database structure using the control files, initialization file, and log
information that were backed up when the Storage Checkpoint was created.
Prerequisites
◆ Enable ARCHIVELOG mode before taking online Storage Checkpoints. See “Backing Up and
Recovering the Database Using Storage Checkpoints” on page 176 and “Using Storage
Checkpoints and Storage Rollback for Backup and Restore” on page 163.
▼ To create a Storage Checkpoint
1. Click the Storage Checkpoints icon in the object tree. (You may need to expand the tree view
to find the icon.)
2. Select one of the following methods to create a Storage Checkpoint.