Oracle Flashback Vs IBM FlashCopy

Question

Hi,
I am evaluating options to implement Oracle Flashback and/or IBM FlashCopy as a backup and recovery solution.
Does any one know of a good source for comparing and contrasting these two technologies.
What I am looking for, in particular, is how each compares against other (pros and cons) in terms of
1. Storage - I know flashback storage requirement based on the feature I would want to use could be more than that required for FlashCopy
2. Recovery time - My initial assessment is that recovery with Flashback is faster than that with FlashCopy
3. Backup - Both flashback and FlashCopy can be used to run backup against them (instead of primary DB site)
4. Site failure - From my reading, I take it that Flashback will not protect DB against site failure while FlashCopy would.
The features below, from my reading, are not available in FlashCopy but are integral part of 10gR2
5. Flashback Database
6. Flashback table
7. Flashback Query
8. Flashback Version Query
9. Flashback Transaction Query
10. Flashback Drop
My question(s): Are any of the features (5 - 10) available with IBM FlashCopy? If so how easy/difficult it would be to flash back tables/queries/transactions using FlashCopy.
For site failure, Oracle Data Guard (physical) standby DB is what I am planning to propose.
Any thoughts/ideas/opinions are highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Marko, I can give you the short version...
IBM designed DataLinks to be a single point of access to content stored on multiple servers. Like many IBM products, DataLinks is (1) predicated on the idea that leaving content where it is now is the right approach, and (2) giving you a toolkit is preferable to a finished product. There isn't anything like the Oracle 9iFS out of the box file server capabilities, and a lot of their content management features are missing or incomplete. As someone at Oracle, of course, I'm also more than a bit skeptical about leaving content where it is an then providing a bunch of pointers (with some additional metadata) to this content. Consolidation is the better approach, if you're looking for economies of scale and greater manageability.
Microsoft's Sharepoint Server is a hybrid "collaborative portal" product. It has features that look like Oracle Portal as well as a very basic collaboration environment with things like versioning and discussion groups. SharePoint also leaves content in the file system, but in this case, it does its best to obfuscate where it is, giving you instead a WebDAV and HTTP interface to it and then using Access and flat files to store all the metadata in it. This doesn't seem like a formula for scalability (and, in fact, Microsoft is pretty circumspect when it talks about scalability in the SharePoint documentation), and there isn't a development environment that lets you customize SharePoint or use it to host applications.
Is that helpful?
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