Windchill DB backup

[karan1904]

Hi All,

Currently whenever we are doing deployments in windchill, we are going for a cold backup of windchill DB. Our windchill DB is 70GB in size and takes 2.5+ hrs for cold backup which is more.

I would like to know if hot backups approach or any other approach which does not require your Windchill Application to be down is used by someone during deployments. Also,if there is any data loss while we revert the hot backup dump.

Kindly share your experiences on this.

Regards

Karan

[MorganBelais]

Hello Karan,

That seems to take a while.

I've just add a look at our backup time and :

• Our full hot backup (full rman) is taking 25 minutes.


• Cold backup is taking around 40 minutes.

Our databse size is 120 Go and rman indicates a work at 60 Mo/s

For the moment we are lucky and we can stop Windchill over night, but I don't see a difficulty switching to Hot backup.

You just have to be careful with vaults/Db sync, but EDC has published a good document on this.

Morgan

[STEVEG]

Karan,

Your email is well timed...for me at least. We are thinking about switching our backup fromcold tohot using Oracle’s RMAN. Our cold backup is taking waaayyy too long. What I can tell you is what I have been told so if anyone can confirm or refute please let us know.

RMAN can create a point-in-time image of the system then export that information out while PDMLink is still running. You also need toset your system to something called Archive mode. This mode gives you the ability to record any changes between two point-in-time images.

Upon a restore the RMAN will restore to the point-in-time image then use the Archive mode for any changes.

This seems like it will help us immensely. However, does anyone have any pros or cons of the RMAN hot backup vs. a third-party cold backup?

Steve G

[bellj]

We do a hot backup every day using export. We don't use archive mode because it would be difficult to take advantage of point-in-time recovery when both the vault and the LDAP have to be synced with the db.

The vault is easy to sync manually. Just delete any files in the vault that have a filename (which is a hex sequence) greater than the last sequence in the db. If there are files missing, that is the latest filename is a sequence less than the last sequence in the db, it doesn't matter.

More difficult to sync manually is the LDAP.

We do a db export, sync a copy of the vault, and export the LDAP every night when all three are the least likely to be changing.
I rehost my non-production servers from this data periodically and it works perfectly.

joe bell
CM Application Administrator

[cforeman]

Just FYI, we were in a similar situation not long ago when we were doing a cold backup of the Oracle DB across the network. It took 2+ hours to back up, although the database was about 120Gb; considerably larger than yours. We have since switched to a process where we back up the DB to a different directory on the same server using the "psexec" utility in Windows (which is then backed up by IT). This takes only about 35-40 minutes. So, we run the backup process on the Windchill app server, and it:

(1) Stops Windchill

(2) Backs up the LDAP (using the appropriate WindchillDS command line to create an LDIF file)

(3) Remotely stops the OracleServiceWIND service on the DB server using the "netsvc" utility.

(3) Initiates a remote xcopy on the DB server using psexec.

(4) Reboots the DB server (and waits for it to restart)

(5) Restarts Windchill

I prefer a cold backup because it's relatively simple and ensures that everything is synced up (except the vault, which is easily addressed as someone else pointed out). I believe psexec and netsvc are both available in the Windows resource kit from Microsoft. We also do a nightly export using the "exp" command.

[wpalm_99]

Karan,

There have already been some good responses on this thread, but I thought
I'd throw in another option. Typically, the DB export is done from the
application server using the exp.exe command from the Oracle client. This
results in the .dmp file being created over the network if the DB and
Windchill are on dedicated hardware. I'm assuming that this is what you
are currently doing for your backup.

Starting in 10G, Oracle included a new export/import tool called the
Datapump (
user in sqlplus to find any directories that are already defined so you
know where it's actually creating the file.

Lastly, the process can be tuned using the parallel argument (