Refreshing QA databases quickly

[KenEwald]

I have about 1-TB of databases to replicate from a production environment to a QA environment.

What methods work best for doing this quickly?

[milinds]

I work in an environment which has multiple databases upto 5 TB each, being a financial institute.
We use BCVs to do hot sync and back them up from the media server. Recovery also is just the time it takes to sync and split + DB recovery. its been very effective and also we have few automated BCV restores whihc run weekly.

[ixion]

That assumes he has speciallized hardware that is capable.

You have PM.

[jhmartin]

Assuming no specialized storage hardware, you can either perform a data-pump export / import (a db-to-db one to avoid the intermediate disk step), or back up the primary database to the secondary and recover it until it is consistent.

Your limiting factor is going to be the bandwidth between the two hosts.

[tamilselvan]

I have about 1-TB of databases to replicate from a production environment to a QA environment.

What methods work best for doing this quickly?

Did you try RMAN to clone the database? I would opt for this first.

BCV is expensive. Since the system went live, I do not think you would consider BCV option now.

Depending upon the dollar you have, you can consider BMC's SQLBACKTRACK also.

[KenEwald]

I'm using rman dup and it is taking too long. The dups are threading ok. just need something that doesn't take all weekend.

Has anyone used mdadm?

[pando]

You need a weekend to move 1TB data...? I thought my current cutomer backup & restore was very slow, they move 800 GB in 28 hours or so

[ixion]

Can you take a subset of the production data instead of the entire DB ?

Less data to move, less to copy, less to load == Much faster.