Oracle 9i RMAN backup filling up all disk and failing at the very end
Hello to all and thank you in advance for any input from any of you.
I am new in oracle and the only one in my company with a little bit of oracle knowledge, which is not a whole lot.
I inherited a few servers (Linux and Windows based). We mostly run all our production environment on a Linux box hosting oracle 10g release 10.2.0.1 but we had a legacy application server that still runs on 9i release 9.2.0.1.0. This server is a windows 2003 box, the previous DBA or someone else with admin rights to this machine compressed the whole drive where oracle resides, when I started summarying the oracle assets, I saw this server with no backups scheduled and a compressed disk with very limited space after this compression, only 13 GB left, the database if uncompressed would definitively filled up all the disk. The machine is in used and cannot be taken down for more than a couple of hours. We tried adding another disk but the machine only accept it as a hot spare. The database is in archive mode, when I tried to run a RMAN backup, it start filling up the database drive until it's empty and it crashes the whole machine, it seems like the buffer is growing and growing until it fills up the whole drive. The only way to get the server up and running again is to reboot the machine since the server is more than 6 years old we are not please with this action because we are afraid the machine would go south in one of those reboots.
Has anyone heard of similar issues when running RMAN on a compressed drive? Can the compressed disk have any involvement in this kind of odd behaviour? I tried running the backup in debug mode and creating a log in a different disk (the one where the backup is going to) and still the same issue. Again any help is much appreciate,
Sincerely,
Alex