Interview Question Asked by SANGHI....kindly give me suggestion

Question

Dear friends,
I recently faced an Interview in some organization....and they have asked me a question for which I cud not able to answer them properly...Kindly give me some sugesstion/solution for the following question..so that I can answer it properly the nxt time..
Q. Suppose in our Organization if u are working as a DBA...and u are taking Physical Backup's (not logical) every week....and the organization is efforting a lot of amount on backup's for which the organization is spending a huge amount....??? as a DBA what can u suggest and how will u reduce the cost effect..
Hope every body understood the question...Kindly reply
Srinivas..

Answer 1

A physical backup is any sort of backup of the physical database files, which basically means anything other than an export of the database. There are a substantial number of ways to take a physical backup-- hot and cold, using RMAN, using custom scripts, etc. so the situation described isn't particularly clear.
That said, my first question would be "What parts of your backup process are accounting for most of your cost?" If they are taking cold backups, perhaps the cost is related to the downtime-- there may be opportunity costs to not having systems available 24x7 and they may be buying more hardware to complete their batch processes in time once the database is back up. If they have custom-written scripts to do hot backups, perhaps those scripts aren't particularly robust, so the DBA's have to spend a lot of time hand-holding the process. In that case, moving to RMAN might save some time and effort. From their initial description, there isn't enough information to provide a useful answer-- they need to provide additional background/ explanation.
Justin
Distributed Database Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC