RMAN interacting with Tivoli

DBAs,

We are new to using rman interacting with Tuvalu.
I have some questions or doubts. If anyone use the same environment, please shed me a light. Thanks!

Our current situation like this:
We plan to delete all the backup pieces older than30 days
due to the physical capacity
1) Does it necessarily need to schedule a job to delete all the
backups older than 3o days using something like :
change backup piece '' delete;?

Before we used sql*backtrace as our backup tool, It can automatically expires the old backup copies and the Tivoli will automatically reuse the space taken by the old backups. It does not
need any extra work to delete the old backups.
But our Tivili person told me that rman with Tivoli is different.
We need to delete them from RMAN.

2) I met this issue:
for one database, from the sqlplus query,
there are a lot of backup piece status is active.
But when I try to delete them from the rman using
change backuppiece 'bk_584087630_3533_1' delete;
I got the following error:
RMAN-06004: ORACLE error from recovery catalog database: RMAN-20260: backup piece not found in the recovery catalog

Does this mean that
maybe someone unregistered this database from the catalog at some time? So the catalog has no information about these backups.
Now we are facing the tape full issue. Then
3) How can I delete all these backups from the Tivoli to
free the space?

Thanks,

Lily

I've used Tivoli with Oracle/Rman for several years now. It was a bit flaky when I first started using it (8i - ~2000), but it's MUCH better now. I don't know how I'd do my backups without it since I don't have that much disk.

What versions are you using?? TDP 5.2 works very well with 9i.

To answer your questions:
1) Yes it necessary to schedule a backup to delete jobs. TSM does not have control over them, RMAN does. But it's pretty simple. Set the persistent configuration for your retention policy:

Code:

---

CONFIGURE RETENTION POLICY TO RECOVERY WINDOW OF 30 DAYS;

---

Then run a job periodically to delete the backups

Code:

---

${ORACLE_HOME}/bin/rman  << EOF
  connect target
  connect catalog rman/${RMAN_PASS}@RCAT
  delete noprompt obsolete;
EOF

---

2&3) There are multiple reasons the piece could be lost. It could be that the database was unregistered/registered. The first thing to try is to do a crosscheck. Make sure your are on the latest release for this. In older versions of Tivoli, crosscheck couldn't find ANYTHING on tape, and would delete all your backups from your repository... not pretty. I know it works in 5.2

Code:

---

${ORACLE_HOME}/bin/rman  << EOF
  connect target
  connect catalog rman/${RMAN_PASS}@RCAT
  crosscheck backup completed before 'sysdate-30';
EOF

---

If that doesn't work, and the files are still on Tivoli, you can delete them using tdposync. Read up on the documentation on this(Tivoli Data Protection for Oracle Installation & Users Guide - Chapter 5 Using the Utilities) . It WILL delete old files on Tivoli that aren't in the catalog anymore. But be careful using it.

Hope that helps!
Jodie

jodie,

Thank you very much! Your reply iswhat I exactly want.

BTW our Tivoli version is:

oracle:OTEBSN(db)> tdpoconf showenvironment


IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Databases:
Data Protection for Oracle
Version 5, Release 2, Level 0.0
(C) Copyright IBM Corporation 1997, 2003. All rights reserved.


DATA PROTECTION FOR ORACLE INFORMATION
Version: 5
Release: 2
Level: 0
Sublevel: 0
Platform: 32bit TDPO Linux86

Thanks,

Lily