VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Oracle Administrator's Guide

Chapter 13, Using the VxDBA Utility
Prerelease 8 September 2005, 8:55am Using VxDBA to Perform Administrative Operations
351
◆ You are in the middle of creating a new Storage Checkpoint and the database or system
crashes. When the system or database is back online, VxDBA detects that not all of the file
systems used by the database contain the named Storage Checkpoint.
You should consider deleting partial Storage Checkpoints that are a result of a database or
system crash, and create a new Storage Checkpoint.
◆ After taking a successful, complete Storage Checkpoint, you add a tablespace on a new file
system or a file system that was not previously used by the database. Again, VxDBA detects
that not all of the file systems used by the database contain the named Storage Checkpoint. In
this case, you can use the partial Storage Checkpoint for Storage Rollback, but only datafiles
on file systems that contain complete Storage Checkpoints can be rolled back.
Be sure you understand the ramifications of rolling back to such a Storage Checkpoint (for
example, losing the new tablespace). See the Oracle Backup and Recovery Guide for
information and tips on restoring databases from an old backup.
◆ One of the file systems used by your database runs out of space and VxFS automatically
removes the oldest Storage Checkpoint on that file system. VxDBA detects that the Storage
Checkpoint on that file system is missing and marks the Storage Checkpoint as partial. Here
again, you may be able to use the partial Storage Checkpoint for Storage Rollback, but do
consider the ramifications of doing so.
To avoid this situation, use VxDBA’s Monitoring Agent to monitor file system space usage on
all file systems used by the database and allow VxDBA to automatically grow the file systems
when they are running out of space. See “Managing File System Space” on page 375 for more
information.
◆ One or more of the file systems used by the database are not VxFS file systems and, therefore,
do not support Storage Checkpoints. VxDBA detects that one or more file system Storage
Checkpoints are missing and marks the Storage Checkpoint as partial.
Avoid using mixed file systems in support of databases when possible.
Mounted means that the Storage Checkpoint is currently mounted. Writable means that the Storage
Checkpoint has been modified, by fsck or by being mounted as read-write, and is not suitable for
Storage Rollback operations.
Ordering of the displayed Storage Checkpoints is by default from most recently created to least
recently created. This ordering may not be intuitive, especially if you want to keep the existing list
items in the same order. If you need to modify this ordering, set the VXDBA_CKPT_SORT
environment variable. The default ordering for sorting Storage Checkpoint names is "-r" (most to
least recent). By setting this variable to another sort option, the Status field identifies if the Storage
Checkpoint is partial (
P), complete (C), invalid (I), mounted (M), read-only (R), or writable (W).