Just a question out of interest more than anything as we are committed to sorting this out whether or not it makes a difference.
Somehow one of our clients has managed to get the BI on their DB set to 4 fixed 2GB extents and a variable extent. I'd be surprised if the BI ever fills the first extent on a bad day.
The issue is that whenever the backups kick in they are experiencing a freeze, in keeping with the backup backing up the BI. This is even happening just after a truncate. The question is, is this freeze going to be longer in their situation of around 8GB of physical BI compared to if they just had a variable extent of a few MB, shortly after a truncate?
Hope I've explained that well enough.
10.2B08 on Windows.
James, yes. The BI is copied in its entirety even if it is mostly empty.
Starting in OE 11.something there is a new feature that only copies the active BI portion. There's been a severe bug around this feature but I think in 11.5+ it is safe to use.
> Starting in OE 11.something there is a new feature that only copies the active BI portion.
Since 11.2:
Dumped %J active BI blocks. (16866)
"bibackup all" option restores the old behaviour (up to HWM).
Only probkup with the -norecovery option will dump all BI extents.
The message may have been in the 11.2 promsgs but the feature was enabled in 11.3.
As has been noted, you shouldn't use the default in 11.3 and 11.4. Those who are on those releases should add "bibackup all" to their probkup command line. The bug is fixed in 11.5+.
Thanks everyone. Confirms we do need to do the maintenance on the BI at some stage.
The good news is that it's highlighted other issues to the right people. They are backing up every 3 hours to minimise data loss risk, but the backups were taking 3+ hours to complete, and combined with a freeze on the BI backup it was causing trouble. Further investigations confirm they weren't deleting the old .bck file first. That reduced backup time to less than 30 minutes. It also highlighted that they aren't running AI. And I've finally managed to convince the people that matter that this is a bad thing. Happy Christmas everyone!!