Archiving Saves the Day

I know of one company that had a 250-GB database that did not use archiving at all. The biggest downside to this was that they could not do hot backups, and a cold backup took too long. The result was that they didn't do any backups! The DBAs didn't want to turn on archiving because they said that it would make the batch loads take too long. They also believed that having archiving turned on would somehow cause database corruption. This is just not possible. Again, the only difference between running and not running archiving is whether the old redolog is copied to the archive destination. The rest of the database works exactly the same.

I tried to convince them to turn on archiving. I even bet them that turning on archiving would not add more than a three percent overhead to their load times. In other words, a five-hour load would take only five hours and nine minutes. I lost the bet because it took five hours and ten minutes. The DBAs agreed to turn on archiving, and the database received its first backup ever in five years. Two weeks later that database lost five disks -- believe it or not. We were able to recover the database overnight with no downtime to the users.