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Does anyone know if it's possible for two different backup utilities to be used to backup the same Oracle database? Both utilities would use RMAN.

So, for example, take an Oracle 11g standby DB with a daily online backup to tape via Netbackup (using the RMAN recovery catalog) and then also take another separate daily backup via TIVOLI (also using the RMAN catalog), could they co-exist in some way? Obviously it's a not a sensible approach, this is just a question of what is or is not possible. Many thanks.

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  • "Obviously it's a not a sensible approach". So why bother?
    – EdStevens
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 12:32
  • Out of necessity. It's for a one-off implementation due to circumstances over which I have no control. It's not a setup anyone would actively pursue. I just made that comment to prevent questions about why anyone would even attempt this. Clearly, that back fired :)
    – Franco
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 21:29

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Creating the symlink $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libobk.so pointing to the media management library is not a strict requirement. As part of RMAN channel allocation, the path of vendor speficic library can be specified in the SBT_LIBRARY parameter.

I never tried this, but just by allocating the SBT channels with different parameters should make this work.

UPDATE:

For your other question about restoring backup pieces from different media:

RMAN has a feature called Autolocation. The RMAN SET AUTOLOCATE ON command is deprecated since 10.2 because this feature is enabled by default. RMAN only needs to track that for example the backup of datafile 1 is included in backuppiece vlv6su4u_1_1 with channel type SBT_TAPE. Using this information and the autolocation feature, RMAN is able to recognize which channel it should use from multiple channels allocated with different options, simply by querying all channels for this backuppiece. This feature was invented for handling backups taken on different RAC nodes, but I was able to use it in another scenario as well: for example after a TSM backup server was migrated (e.g full backup from old TSM server + file space, incremental and archivelog backups from new TSM server + file space, channels allocated with different tdpo.opt files pointing to old and new TSM servers).

The same may work with 2 different MMLs as well.

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  • Thanks for the reply. How would RMAN handle this though? How could it track the different backups?
    – Franco
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 12:44
  • @Franco RMAN does not need to track anything. All it needs to store is a name of the backuppiece, a handle, and the rest is done by the MML.
    – Balazs Papp
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 13:02
  • I guess what I mean is how would RMAN restore the pieces. Would it not be a problem when restoring to a point in time if you don't know which media was used for a certain backup?
    – Franco
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 14:32
  • @Franco I edited my original answer to add this because the answer to that question is longer than the limit of a comment.
    – Balazs Papp
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 15:22
  • Wonderful. I wasn't aware of that feature. In that case it's worth testing such a solution to see if hangs together. Many thanks for the information!
    – Franco
    Commented Aug 5, 2020 at 16:16

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