August 16, 2004 at 3:00 pm
We would like to log ship and backup our databases with the Tivoli TDP. However, I've been perusing the TDP documentation and it doesn't appear to be log shipping aware. In other words, if I backup the tranlog with TDP and then truncate the log, some records may not get log shipped. Conversely, if I log ship and then truncate the log, TDP may not have backed up some transactions. Does anyone have experience with this process? Do we have to do something interesting like move the database backups to the standby site??
August 16, 2004 at 11:09 pm
First of all, you shouldn't have to separately backup and truncate the logs. Just schedule regular log backups, and allocate sufficient space for your log files. The log files won't grow uncontrollably, since a log backup also does a log truncate (remember that a truncate is an internal operation that marks part of the logical log as being ready to be over-written, as opposed to a shrink that actually causes a log file to get smaller).
Having said that, you can certainly do log shipping with TDP, but you might have to write scripts to do it yourself. You may wind up getting better information on this from somebody else, but the reason I am thinking this is that the wizard-based log shipping processes rely on storing the logs in a file location so that the periodic loads can find the backups. In other words, these log loads are driven from the SQL Server side.
However, to the best of my knowledge, neither SQL Server nor the SQL Server Agent understands natively how to talk to TDP (or to TSM directly) to get those backups back from TSM storage. For example, to do a restore you have to go to the TDPSQL console, or use TDPSQLC.EXE - you can't just go into the SQL EM backup / restore interface, because that interface can't talk to TDP/TSM. You may be in a similar situation here, which would mean you would have to drive the process from the TDPSQL tools, not from the SQL Client Tools. So you may find yourself writing interesting scripts.
But it shouldn't be that hard to accomplish, since the TDP client for SQL supports STANDBY recoveries, which is what you'd need to accomplish.
You may want to consider joining the ADSM-L list (if you're not already a memeber) and posting there. Del Hoobler and the others from IBM might be able to help you out. Information about this list can be found at http://www.lsoft.com/SCRIPTS/WL.EXE?SL1=ADSM-L&H=VM.MARIST.EDU.
Cheers,
Chris
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