Oracle Database Discussions

Hello friends,

I have just had the opportunity to have IBM/Tivoli present a new feature called Advanced Copy Services.
This feature provides the ability to take a very quick 'flash' copy of a live (hot) database, then copy it to another hard disk partition or server on the SAN or network, then allows us to use RMAN to make a normal copy of the 'flashcopied' database. The time it takes to make a 'flash' copy is reported as only a couple minutes. I'd actually like to know specifically how long this takes for a real database of approximately 300Gb.

The whole point of the software is to eliminate the need for long down times for backups.

This sounds great, and I'm trying to understand how this can be done.

Apparently, Oracle has a (fairly new) alter system suspend and resume command that makes this possible.

Has anyone used these alter system commands for this purpose (flashcopy and backups)? Is this really possible to run for this purpose?

I've found a few sites with information about it and it seems it can be done as the vendor says.
When did Oracle provide this new capability? I was not aware of this.

NOTE: When I did some testing, I 'suspended' the database, yet I could still select from tables, but I could not perform any DDL or DML operations. Apparently the suspend performs a form of transaction lock on all objects in the database.

Thanks.

Ji Li