Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 Advanced Features Administrator"s Guide (5900-1503, April 2011)

■ Decision support analysis and reporting—Operations such as decision support
analysis and business reporting may not require access to real-time
information. You can direct such operations to use a replica database that you
have created from snapshots, rather than allow them to compete for access
to the primary database. When required, you can quickly resynchronize the
database copy with the data in the primary database.
See “About decision support” on page 177.
■ Testing and training—Development or service groups can use snapshots as
test data for new applications. Snapshot data provides developers, system
testers and QA groups with a realistic basis for testing the robustness, integrity
and performance of new applications.
■ Database error recovery—Logic errors caused by an administrator or an
application program can compromise the integrity of a database. You can
recover a database more quickly by restoring the database files by using Storage
Checkpoints or a snapshot copy than by full restoration from tape or other
backup media.
Use Storage Checkpoints to quickly roll back a database instance to an earlier
point in time.
See “About database recovery using Storage Checkpoints” on page 195.
Note: To provide continuity of service in the event of hardware failure in a cluster
environment, you can use point-in-time copy solutions in conjunction with the
high availability cluster functionality of Veritas Storage Foundation™ for Cluster
File System HA or Veritas Storage Foundation HA for the DB2, Oracle and Sybase
databases.
Note: To provide continuity of service in the event of hardware failure in a cluster
environment, you can use point-in-time copy solutions in conjunction with the
high availability cluster functionality of the HP Serviceguard Storage Management
Suite.
139Understanding point-in-time copy methods
Point-in-time copy use cases