[CLUE-Tech] Oracle and compression

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 11 Jul 2002 14:12:43 -0400 (EDT)
Adam Bultman <adamb at glaven.org> wrote:

> I have a question, and it deals with oracle databases. Since Jed is an
> Oracle person, maybe he's the best to answer this.

Hmmm, maybe I'll set up an PayPal (errr, um, E-bayPal?) donation button on
my website for Oracle support. ;-)

> Because of budget constraints, I have to back up a development box
> without a tape drive. I wrote a script in perl (it's a windows box) that
> makes raw copies of the oracle databases (exporting won't work, I can't
> get OMS to work properly, no, scratch that, at all).  I then zip them up
> and FTP them over to another server that IS backed up with tape.
> 
> Will oracle get angry if I do that? If I trash my database tomorrow,
> will it get angry that I compressed the files?  Obviously, they'll be
> uncompressed when I put them back into 'production', but I don't know if
> that would somehow affect the files (Even though they should be the same
> exact file, bitwise).

Nope, no problems there. On unix boxen, I've gzipped or compressed lots of
Oracle stuff. Heck, many tape backup systems do compression on-the-fly as
they write the tape. BTW, I'd surprised if the "export" command isn't
available from the command line.

-- 
We're frogs who are getting boiled in a pot full of single-character
morphemes, and we don't notice. - Larry Wall; Perl6, Apocalypse 5