Hi experts,

I am a relatively newbie here. Just want to confirm with you guys about this situation.

Oracle allow users to do manual hot backup using 'alter tablespace begin backup;'. If after a user wants to backup all the tablespaces and put the statements into one scripts while the database is still live, what is the implications afterwards?
From my understanding, If we use this way while Oracle read the script, it will read and run one statement at a time. That means from the first statement to the last one the SCN will definitely changes a lot of times and in the end the backup of those datafiles are not consistent to each other. When we do recovery, should the db is not in archivelog mode, we will not be able to recover from those backups.

On other hand, I read something about 'alter tablespace offline normal;' which shed a light towards the solution but it turns out to be a failure. This is not applicable in a live system since RBS and SYSTEM cannot be taken offline.

But I notice it is really interesting to see that Oracle claimed the 'offline' way to be a cold backup. Is that true?


Thanks for your help.

Ric