I had this very strange experience today. One of my clients invited me to a meeting with their provider of Disaster Recovery Solutions (from now on called “DRS”). I was there to explain the intricate details of Oracle backup, restore and recovery. “DRS” is a rather successful player in the field of cloud backups, primarily for the SMB segment. They have added database backups and Enterprise style disaster recovery solutions to their portfolio. Everything seems to be based on off-the-shelf products that “DRS” sell under their own brand. Fair enough, this is what commodity computing is all about.
What is not so fair is that the Oracle backup solution is a blast from the past, utilizing “ALTER TABLESPACE … BEGIN BACKUP;”. Yes, I kid you not. Also, “DRS” was (1) not aware of this and (2) did not understand that this was a bad thing. The net-net of the meeting was that “DRS” offered my client to run a recovery test on the database server (“I think I have done Oracle recovery once before”) to prove that they had a good handle on the situation.
I am not sure if I should laugh or cry. My client is in a bind and “DRS” is not helping by continuing to pretend that is something they know how to do.
The really interesting thing about this whole story is how it highlights the pedagogical challenge involved in explaining database backup and restore/recovery concepts. Most of the time the databases just works. It is very seldom that one has to perform any kind of recovery. On top of that, vendors like Microsoft provide sleek interfaces to their backup utilities. This fuels the illusion that database backup and restore/recovery is simple and not really different from regular sysadmin work.
Posted by ebraekke 