Oracle Database: Incremental Forever Schedules on Linux Platforms

SUMMARY

Oracle Database: Incremental Forever Schedules on Linux Platforms

ISSUE

Purpose

If you are running application level Oracle Database backups you should exclude Oracle Database objects from the journal. This article applies to the following:

Description

The Unitrends Linux Agent runs a journaling daemon called mynotify to track changes to individual files on the client.  This journal is used when running incremental and differential backups to reduce the overhead associated with identifying recently modified or deleted files.  If you are running application level Oracle Database backups you should exclude Oracle Database objects from the journal.

Cause

Oracle Database generates a high volume of events for the journal.  This can lead to frequent file-level incremental backup failures due to a Journal Range Exceeded error.  To prevent this you need to exclude Oracle Database directories from journal tracking and ensure you are running both file-level and application-level backups.

Resolution

Run the following from a terminal on the client while logged in as root:

1. Load your Oracle Instance location into the shells environment:

. /etc/oraInst.loc
echo ${inventory_loc}

2. Identify the Oracle Home locations for each instance of Oracle Database:

grep LOC ${inventory_loc}/ContentsXML/inventory.xml

3. Identify the Oracle Base directory for each instance of Oracle Database.  For each Oracle Home path identified in step 2. run the following:

export ORACLE_HOME=path
${ORACLE_HOME}/bin/orabase

4. Add each of the Oracle Home and Oracle Base locations to the journals excusion file.  For each Oracle Home and Oracle Base path run the following:

echo path >> /usr/bp/incremental_forever/journal.excludes

5. Restart the mynotify daemon.

/usr/local/bin/mynotify stop
/usr/local/bin/mynotify start