July 15, 2005
Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery is a topic that's slowly creeping up the awareness scale in our community. Recently one of our academic customers had a test-run with their supplier and I was there for the Sybase part of recovering their Library Management Server. I arrived on site thinking "server room" so at first walked right past the trailers parked just outside the library.
I was quite impressed that between the supplier and their IT department they'd done an excellent job of recovering the Operating System configuration, file systems and raw disk slices for Sybase to use. A minor hiccup showed the importance of updating the disaster recovery information after database expansions, fortunately this was easily corrected as there was free space present on the disks. Next was the Sybase recovery, which started with putting back the master database. Fortunately save_master was running in the cron of this system so a quick recovery from /scratch/master was done, followed by patching up of broken devices and databases before a load. This turned out to be an interesting exercise as when you're at the system console, you don't have the luxury of being able to copy and paste, something I have got very used to lately. A better approach would be to have most of the recovery scripted and the script(s) placed in one of the areas of the system that will be recovered very early on.
I wonder how many of your institutes have a full disaster recovery plan in place? How many are working on one? Does it include your Library servers, PCs and terminals, etc?
Why not share your experiences in the Infrastructure Forums.
Posted by Ateeq Altaf at 04:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 07, 2005
New features in Sybase ASE
As well as looking at what Solaris 10 has to offer we are also looking at the latest version of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise.
Version 12.5.3 includes a number of useful new additions. Here are some of the highlights.
- Dynamic Cache Management: You can now adjust memory used for caches without any need to restart the server.
- Job Scheduler: You can automatically schedule jobs such as backups and consistency checks, so no need to use the cron file. You can also use the scheduler to monitor resources such as connections and locks, which can be dynamically adjusted as needed.
- Automated Database Space Management: databases and logs can automatically grow to meet changing load & system requirements.
- Automatic Garbage Collection: Unused space is cleaned up during garbage collection cycles, making it unnecessary to run maintenance tasks such as table and index reorgs.
- New tools: DBXray and DB Expert are two tools designed to help monitor and improve the performance of your databases.
- Dynamic Listeners: You can now start, stop, or query system listeners without having to restart Sybase.
- Dump and load across platforms: You can now dump and load databases across platforms with different architectures. A Windows or Solaris X86 based MIS Server anyone?
All these new features sound great. We've now got to spend the time investigating how we can make the best use out of them.
As always your feedback either via comments on this blog, on the Infrastructure Forum or directly via e-mail would be appreciated.
Posted by jimprince at 07:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
