Running a live backup (Oracle)

A live IBM OpenPages® backup means that the application can continue running while the backup is in progress. The services are not stopped during the backup.

Note: Run live OpenPages backups during off-peak hours because the backup consumes processing resources.

You might encounter errors such as the following during the database export portion of the live OP backup:

[exec] ORA-31693: Table data object "OPENPAGES"."table_name"
       failed to load/unload and is being skipped due to error:
[exec] ORA-02354: error in exporting/importing data
[exec] ORA-01555: snapshot too old: rollback segment number # 
       with name "rollback_segment_name" too small

This might happen if there is a relatively high level of data modification transactional activity on the system during the backup. Run a live backup when transactional activity is low. If this is not possible or not desirable, or if the error keeps happening, it may be possible to avoid this error by setting UNDO_RETENTION initialization parameter to a higher (possibly much higher) value, at least for the duration of the backup. Setting UNDO_RETENTION to a higher value, may result in a growth of UNDO table space, so it should be done by an experienced database administrator or with the assistance of IBM® Support.

To use the OpenPages application backup utility live, you run the OPBackup command with the nosrvrst option. This does the following:

  • Backs up OpenPages application and environment files
  • Exports the OpenPages application database

Procedure

  1. Open a command or shell window on the OpenPages admin application server.
  2. Navigate to the <OP_Home>/aurora/bin directory.
  3. Type the following backup command:
    Windows 
    OPBackup <path-to-backup-location> nosrvrst
    Linux® 
    OPBackup.sh <path-to-backup-location> nosrvrst

    where:

    Windows
    <path-to-backup-location> is <ORACLE_BASE>\admin\<SID>\dpdump
    Linux
    <path-to-backup-location> is <ORACLE_BASE>/admin/<SID>/dpdump

Results

The backup process creates a log file in the <backup-directory-name> directory. Each time you run the OPBackup command, a separate log file is generated.