VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Oracle Administrator's Guide

VERITAS Database FlashSnap Prerelease 8 September 2005, 8:54am
34 VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle Administrator’s Guide
VERITAS Database FlashSnap
VERITAS Database FlashSnap is a feature included with VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle
Enterprise Edition. It is also a separately licensed option available with VERITAS Storage
Foundation for Oracle Standard Edition.
VERITAS Database FlashSnap offers a flexible and efficient means of managing business-critical
data. Database FlashSnap lets you capture an online image of an actively changing database at a
given instant, called a point-in-time copy. You can perform system backup, upgrade, or perform
other maintenance tasks on point-in-time copies while providing continuous availability of your
critical data. If required, you can offload processing of the point-in-time copies onto another host to
avoid contention for system resources on your production server.
Database FlashSnap takes advantage of the Persistent FastResync and Disk Group Content
Reorganization features of VxVM. Database FlashSnap also streamlines database operations. Once
configured, the database administrator can create snapshots, resynchronize data, and reverse
resynchronize data without involving the system administrator.
VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle provides three commands that can be executed by the
database administrator and do not require root privileges:
◆ dbed_vmchecksnap
◆ dbed_vmsnap
◆ dbed_vmclonedb
These commands let database administrators take advantage of the VxVM snapshot functionality
without having to deal with storage operations in day-to-day database uses. To use Database
FlashSnap, you must configure the volumes used by the database according to the guidelines in
“Preparing Hosts and Storage for Database FlashSnap” on page 204.