We’re having a problem with BOE right now and our BOE admin has been on with their support tech for weeks now. The guy keeps insisting that the problem is our DB backups. He says that taking offline backups takes the DB offline so BOE loses connection during that time. The problem is that we don’t take offline backups and I don’t know anybody in the mssql world who does. That’s a fairly common occurance in the Oracle world, but we just don’t do it. Now you take that and combine it with the fact that the backup only lasts a few secs and is over 40mins before the problem occurs every day and you’ve got a nice recipe for moving on and trying something else. But does he do that? Nooooo… of course not. Instead he keeps insisting that the DB is going offline somehow.
So I wrote a quick powershell ping script that pings every 60secs and writes the result to a file. And I ran it from 2 separate servers, including the BOE server. And the DB never faltered once. And again, you’ve got the pefect ingredients for moving on, but is that the route we’re taking? Of course not. So I told our BOE admin to have the issue escalated and to most importantly, never mention the DB as a problem with this issue again. I’m not going to say it again… it’s not the DB.
Let’s hope the next tech can see past the DB and actually try to solve the issue.
What is BOE?
There is a feature in MS SQL Server like online backups that we use – sp_detach_db. We then copy the file off somewhere else before reattching it
Doing it this way means to restore all you need to do is copy the file back and attach it again. This is quicker than copying the backup and restoring it.
It does have its drawbacks – the database is obviously not available while it is dettached. However it does make for a lot faster and easier restore.
And of course it had been a good long time since Oracle had to go offline to do a backup.