On one of our key ASA 9.0.2 databse ,we want to perform DBUnload and reload
operation.

The steps we outlined are as follows -

1) Make sure there are no connections / open transactions on the server
2) Unload the database
3) Create a new database using DBINIT
4) Defragment the drive
5) Load the database

I request your help in following -

1) In order to preserve current options set for the server and database and
apply to the newly created
database, is there any easy way to extract all settings of current
server/database ?
2) Which format of DBUnload you suggest, and, what are the benefits.
(ie. internal-internal or internal-external or external-internal or
external-external)
3) Are there any known issues or cautions that we should look for.

Thanks for your help and appreciate your response.

Did you look at dbunload -an which does 2,3 and 5 in one step and handles
your questions 1&2 for you. You can defrag the drive after building the
database which will ensure the .db file has the minimum number of fragments

As a more complete answer:

1) dbunload automatically preserves all options you have set in the
database. The only thing you need to manage are the dbinit parameters.
dbunload -an manages those for you as well.

2) whenever possible a server side (internal/internal) unload/reload is best
since it involves the "least amount of work". The others all work fine they
just involve more processing

3) No and yes. Be paranoid. Just because lots of people do this process
all of the time without incident does not mean that Murphy will not invade
your site. Take a backup before you start this process. Make sure you
validate a copy of the backup. Test your recovery plan.
--
/steve - if I had a Canadian nickel for every time I've heard "I don't have
a good backup"...
Stephen Rice
Sybase iAnywhere

"MD" <md0710 (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

We had to rebuild a good bunch of customer DBs when upgrading from 7.0
to 9.0. Our tests showed performance benefits, if we followed these 3 steps:
- create new DB (using dbinit)
- start iSQL on the new db and add pages up to expected rebuilt size
(ALTER DBSPACE xxx ADD nnnn MB)
- use dbunload -ii ... to load the everything into the newly created DB

An optional step in beetween would be reorganizing the new DB before
dbunload. Fast solution using CONTIG to defragment only then new db/log
(http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sk/Contig.mspx)

Problems we encountered:
- stored procedures with duplicate variable declaration aborted unload
- view could not compiled (unknown reason; using -xi worked)
- one single error (corrupt data/index) aborts the whole process

Reimer

MD wrote:

On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:45:49 +0100, Stephen Rice
<"srice[at]sybase[dot]com"> wrote:

Hi,

We found that, depending on environment, but especially for a local db
engine, using unload/load to a file was up to three times faster than
piping the data from db to db without intermediate files. This may or may
not be an issue for you, however.

Frank

Thanks to all of you for your help and support as well as
shaing your experiences, this is extremely helpful to me. I
will (ofcourse) take the backup before starting anything,
and, I plan to use -ii option while doing dbunload. I am
wary of using -ar because if the process fails, the existing
DB will be in an unknown state. I think it is safer to use
-ii option so that I have ability to create a new db with
new size, add space, do CONTIG, and then load it. If the
load fails, I will still have original DB intact without
needing to restore it from the backup. Ofcourse more disk
space will be needed, but that's ok. The DB is 15 GB, can
anyone estimate how long it would take for the entire
operation ? Also, appreciate if you have any comments on my
approach.