I have a few snapshot questions for anyone else who's running Oracle:
1. Does a hot backup (as described on http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3049.html) present any restoration problems? Has anyone done a restore from a hot backup? 2. Hot backups are as close to "live" as you're supposed to come, but it seems to me that a nice extra bit of paranoia would be to take snapshots 2-3 times per day of the live database. The image would be consistent, and Oracle would come up off of it as it would from a crash (unlike, say a tar of the data-files which would be junk). The only problem would be that you would loose any half-completed actions which were not correctly tansactionalized. Can anyone comment on this? 3. Has anyone seen roughly how much storage an Oracle snapshot takes? It seems to me that it would be larger than a filesystem snapshot because more blocks are changing. Of course, it depends on your read/write ratio, but is there a general consensus? I've so far been very impressed with my filer. Oracle over NFS sounded outright dumb to me at first, but damn if it isn't faster than local disk.
Thanks.