Offline vs. hot backups

[gopi]

(9i, Solaris, archivelog mode)

If you had a 2 hour a day window to do 10 minute RMAN offline backups - would you? Or for some advantage would you choose hot rman backups?

Starting up the database after the backup I must re-pin objects in the memory. That seems to be the only extra work.

Thanks in advance for your opinion.

[TimHall]

There is no reason to do cold backups these days. Bouncing the instance is a disaster as far as performance is concerned. It takes time to warm up the caches again and all your performance stats are reset. Tom Kyte is always advising people to do online backups with RMAN. This way you don't even need to switch the tablespaces in to backup mode. It's the quickest and least intrusive method of backing up.

Cheers