Good TSM Oracle Backup Blog

I came across this website and it has a lot of TSM Oracle backup related information. If you perform Oracle TDP backups then check out this site.

Oracle RMAN Catalogue Cleanup

This is an update to a story posted back in August 2005

Why do people love Oracle? When I hear mention of Oracle I think of Luke Skywalker when he saw the Millennium Falcon, "What a piece of junk!" Like the Falcon it looks clunky, breaks down easily, and has the most temperamental behavior. When it's running, however, it screams. The problem is that DBA's and/or the RMAN catalogue sometimes don't do appropriate cleanup. If the DBA's are doing their job they should be using the tdposync syncdb command to do cleanup with TSM. If you cannot get them to do this or it doesn't seem to be working correctly you can use a manual process on the TSM side. If you want to make sure that a particular node is performing cleanup within TSM run the following select command -

select object_id from backups where node_name=[TDP NODENAME] and
backup_date < '2007-06-01 00:00:00'

This can be redirected to a file then used later to delete with an undocumented delete command. If there is data going further back than your retention requirements state then you have a problem with the DB cleanup.

I am posting the undocumented TSM individual backup object delete command here, but remember any deletion from the TSM DB is done AT YOUR OWN RISK!

delete object 0 [Object ID Number]


It's unsupported because Tivoli doesn't trust you to not screw stuff up, and although I don't think you will, I understand their concern. Put this into a shell script and you can process thousands of objects and do a large amount of cleanup in a short ammount of time.

Oracle TDP and HACMP 5.3 Incompatibility Resolved

Well I was have a heck of a time with this problem. It seems the 5.3 HACMP binaries are incompatible with the Oracle 64-bit API so the TDP would crash when attempting to backup a DB on a cluster. I was expecting a fix and was told it would be available by January. So I waited, and watched and never saw an update to the TDP. Frustration mounted until I was able to get ahold of a TDP developer who pointed out that it was the HACMP side that had to do the patching and now all is well. So if you are looking to use HACMP and backup Oracle DB's with the TDP make sure they have the latest patch levels installed or the 64-bit API will not work.

Got HACMP?

Well our group got stung again this last week. While working a HACMP implementation we were asked to install the Oracle TDP and TSM client. We installed the TSM client and all went well and we then installed the TDP and the DBA’s could not get the password file to generate. Each time they tried the utility would core dump. When trying to run the utility multiple ways it always core dumped. After calling support we were informed that the current 64-bit Oracle TDP (And from what I have found through Google it could be any 64-bit TDP). It seems they rebuilt HACMP version 5.3 and the TDP is not compatible with the new way it was compiled. There is a patch projected to be released as of end of the month, but we cannot wait that long so our options are to use temporary disk and mirror the DB, then break and backup the mirrored copy when we want to backup, or we can roll back to HACMP 5.2. The problem with the latter is that we basically have to rebuild the boxes. So be warned there are issues with the latest and greatest version of HACMP at this time.

Oracle RMAN Catalogue Cleanup

Why do people love Oracle? When I hear mention of Oracle I think of Luke Skywalker when he saw the Millenium Falcon, "What a piece of junk!" Like the Falcon it looks clunky, breaks down easily, and has the most tempermental behavior. When it's running, however, it screams. The problem is that the RMAN catalogue sometimes doesn't do appropriate cleanup. If you want to make sure that a particular node is performing cleanup within TSM run the following select command -

select object_id from backups where node_name= and
backup_date < '2005-07-01 00:00:00'

This can be redirected to a file then used later to delete with an undocumented delete command. I will give the delete command out to those who need it, but remember any deletion from the TSM DB is done AT YOUR OWN RISK! It's unsupported because Tivoli doesn't trust you to not screw stuff up, and although I don't think you will, it's better safe then sorry.