Special Features of BRBACKUP 

The parameter parallel_instances must be set in the init<DBSID>.sap profile used by BRBACKUP in order that BRBACKUP be able to access all the ORACLE instances.

The backup of a database with the Parallel Server configuration using the SAP utility BRBACKUP runs as follows:

  1. All ORACLE instances which are stopped are restarted in parallel by BRBACKUP with the appropriate SQLDBA commands.
  2. BRBACKUP logs on to the local (DDB) instance and carries out the common actions in the database (determination of the database structure, the volumes used...).
  3. If an offline backup is to be carried out, all instances are stopped. In all other cases, they continue running during the backup.
  4. The required backup is started.
  5. If an offline backup was carried out, all database instances are restarted in parallel at the end of the backup.
  6. BRBACKUP updates the tables SDBAH and SDBAD.
  7. The status of all instances before the start of the backup with BRBACKUP is recovered. That is, the instances which were stopped before the backup are now stopped again.

During the entire backup, BRCONNECT monitors all database instances and checks them constantly to see that the required status of the instances stays unchanged. If the status of an instance changes during the backup, BRCONNECT interrupts the entire backup.

In the BRBACKUP log, both before and after the actual backup, a log is made of the parameters relevant to the online redo log files that are being archived for all database instances in question (output of the ARCHIVE LOG LIST command).

If you run an offline backup of the entire database, a file of all online redo log groups for the ORACLE instances is saved in each case.

The functionality of BRBACKUP is available (in particular, the support of software and hardware compression) with one exception concerning the dd command: when using the dd command, there is no continuation mechanism. See Supporting the Raw Device Configuration with BRBACKUP and BRRESTORE.