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Best practice advice for backing up the Jazz data base


Gary Karasiuk (3183) | asked Feb 03 '08, 8:42 a.m.
I'd be curious to know how the jazz net folks back up their data base. Is there an article that describes a best practice for keeping these very important data safe?

I'm running Beta 2a, using WebSphere 6.1 and DB2. My normal (automated) backup approach is to:

1) at 24:09 quiesce the data base
2) backup the data base (incremental on six, full backup on the seventh)
3) unquiesce the data base

but I am seeing lots of errors in the WebSphere log. It may just be that I picked a poor time, because now I think Jazz is doing some sort of "data mining" at midnight, and this might be conflicting with the backup.

3 answers



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Gary Karasiuk (3183) | answered Feb 05 '08, 12:35 p.m.
Thanks for your responses.

I did switch to use using online backups a few days ago, and things seem to be working well.

It is just that I got burned a few years ago doing online backups, where I wasn't able to restore the backup (without help from the db2 development team). Ever since then I haven't used them ... but in hindsight I think it was a user error on my part.

My new approach for the Jazz db is to do daily online backups, and a weekly full backup, where I stop the server first.

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Hari Vetsa (3165) | answered Feb 05 '08, 12:07 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Gary

The one difference between your procedure and jazz.net is We do not quiesce the database. There is no reason to do so.As a matter of fact, one should not quiesce the database.

The online backup of DB2 server is sophisticated enough that it handles all the ongoing transactions during the backup.

I haven't see the errors in your WebSphere logfiles, but what could be happening when you give the quiesce command you are prohibiting all connections from Jazz Application to the database until unquiesce command. Jazz uses a connection pool to access database server and keeps on trying to connect to database until successsful.

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Scott Rich (57136) | answered Feb 04 '08, 10:27 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Gary, I can give you the general idea of our backup procedures. We originally used a stop/backup/start procedure, but later went to enabling online backups. There are a few changes you need to make to the DB2 logging config to enable it, but this has worked well for us. We do not quiesce, and I'm not actually sure of our schedule, but I think we have moved it around to avoid the late-night data warehouse tasks. We only do full offline backups at deployments, which is effectively monthly.

Hope this helps.

Scott Rich
<knocking wood for having spoken about backup/restore>
Jazz team

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