Message-ID: <59d991c404070613483799688f@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 16:48:14 -0400
From: Christopher Petrilli <petrilli@gmail.com>
To: Anony Mous <a.mous@shaw.ca>
Subject: Re: Do we need more emphasis on backup?
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
In-Reply-To: <005801c4637e$2f1a7a30$7402a8c0@PETER>
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References: <005801c4637e$2f1a7a30$7402a8c0@PETER>

On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 11:25:07 -0600, Anony Mous <a.mous@shaw.ca> wrote:
> Scary if the person has a DBA background.  But there are lots of people,
> like myself, who find themselves doing this sort of work and do not have the
> formal training (small business, small db, but still an important part of
> the business IS).  Now, I know my limits and I would not take on the task of
> administering a high-volume, mission-critical DB.  Nonetheless, there are
> many tips, tricks, and gotcha's that I have yet to learn.
> 
> I welcome an FAQ on this subject and genuinely appreciate the efforts of
> those who create it.  It will make me a better "wanna-be"!

One thing this strikes me as is an opportunity to help shape the
perception of DBAs and "real" databases versus "toy" databases. 
Various products have gotten a lot of people out there running
databases with lots of mission criticle data in them, but they're
trusting a lot of slip-shod software and not putting into place any
proceedures to deal with backups and other things.

For example, I recently dealt with a customer who was using another
database, and had been running backups religiously for the past year.
The problem? The backups were of a live database, and it turned out
when they tried to restore, it was unable to get the tables back into
a position where they were usable without dropping a huge amount of
data from the tables, and then rebuilding indexes. A pain. All because
they'd not taken the right steps.

If the PostgreSQL community can help put together a "best practices"
guide, that will help all database people, but it will also help show
the PostgreSQL community as being more "serious." I'm more than happy
to contribute practices, and things, as well as help edit other
people's work, but I can't "lead" such an effort right now.

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli@gmail.com