incremental backup sybase

[Former Member]

I have Sybase ASE 15.7 SP 138 in my environment.

can somebody confirm if Incremental \ Differential backup is supported for this version?

thanks in advance .

[sladebe]

Also, you can use the sp_dump_info command to see an estimate of what percentage of the database would be dump in a cumulative backup.

My experience is, if the cumulative backup would be more than 40% of the total database size, it's faster to run a full backup. Note, the sp_dump_info command can sometimes take a few minutes to run on big databases.

The cumulative backups have been an amazing win at my site. People don't realize it, but for big database sites, backups can be a major driver of disk and network bandwidth. You often see websites running slow on weekends because they're overloaded running backups. Our site has reduced our backup activity by maybe 80% since we've started using cumulative backups.

Note, be careful shrinking databases off devices where you leave a hole in the middle of the database. Cumulative restores get confused in cases like this (CR# 799651, which is a fix for "Msg 3193... Database 'mydb' does not have space allocated for page NNNNN from the dump. Extend the database by ZZZZZ MB and retry the command.", where ZZZZZ is an overly large number)

<whine>
I find it annoying that you have to set the option "allow incremental dumps" to allow cumulative backups on a database. "Incremental" sounds like transaction log dumps. I guess they didn't have time for a design review.
</whine>

And, just for the record, in Microsoft SQL Server land, they call dumping all changes since the last dump "differential backups"

[bart_van_kuijk · Accepted solution]

Hello Sachin

The terms "Incremental" and "Differential" can be explained in different ways, so the question is not entirely clear to me.

ASE has three types of dump command :

- dump database db_name
- dump database db_name cumulative (SP100)
- dump transaction db_name

ASE has always had the option of taking full database dump followed by a sequence of (many) tran dumps, which was (and still is) often referred as incremental or sequential dumps. After a period of time (depending on recovery strategy, often daily), a new full database would be taken.

With the term "Differential", I assume you are referring to the 'Cumulative Dump' feature which is available from SP100, so indeed available for SP138:

http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc00641.1570100/doc/html/at...

Kind regards

Bart van Kuijk

[pindba]

Hello Sachin,

Assuming you are asking for Cumulative backup , yes it is available in ASE SP138 ..

Few Things to Note

you should enable the db option 'allow incremental dumps' for the database you want to perform incremental dump

Additionally, as far as dump file size of cumulative , dump takes the backup of the modified/new blocks so good practice would be to run your full backup after weekly maintenance(like reorg/rebuild index which do change the blocks) and then follow with cumulative backup.

Reards,

Basavaraj