One of our tasks in the office is to do database backups. We were taught (us all operators working here) that it is done via a bunch of specialized scripts. Those scripts are at least 10 years old (system is an AIX 4.1).
One of those script does an fsck against the databases. Everytimes we run it we see a message saying something like running an fsck against a filesystem does not produce reliable results. The databases are in Oracle 7.(something) and are located in a file system on each servers we do it.
All of what the script does is "fsck -n /db_componant_on_a_filesystem".
Is this a good idea to do this ? We are questioning how some of the scripts/tasks are done because we believe (or think) they are either wrong or should be done in a different manner.
You don't run an fsck against a database, but on a filesystem.
The error message relates to the filesystem being mounted. It's hard to check something that might be changing.
I'm not sure that it's either a good idea, or a bad one!
This is from the AIX man page for fsck:
In most cases (or very many cases, at least), an Oracle backup will be taken using RMAN (I only ever used Oracle 8 at first - but presume RMAN to have been there before that!). If the database is Oracle 7, then the RMAN scripts will be for that version, and won't need to have been modified.
So what exactly is your problems with the backup scripts?