Re: Tarring up Oracle files?

From: Darren Dunham (ddunham_at_redwood.taos.com)
Date: 11/17/04 

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 16:38:41 GMT

tonij67@hotmail.com wrote:
> I thought I heard at one point that making tar files of various Oracle
> data renders them unusable, something about Oracle data having "holes"
> in the files and using tar on them collapses these "holes" or
> something to this effect...

Some versions of tar may *expand* holes to occupy real space on disk,
but that shouldn't do anything by itself to corrupt an oracle file.

> Does anyone know about this? A previous admin set up some jobs to
> shut down Oracle and tar up the directories but the dbas have never
> been successful at restoring a databae this way and I suspect this has
> something to do with it.

I know of no reason for this.

If you do a /bin/sum or some md5 check on the files before the tar and
after the untar, are they the same? 

-- 
Darren Dunham                                           ddunham@taos.com
Senior Technical Consultant         TAOS            http://www.taos.com/
Got some Dr Pepper?                           San Francisco, CA bay area
         < This line left intentionally blank to confuse you. >

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