SO much or Oracle dos not work as you expect
I was also working with my team of Oracle DBA's. They had set up a backup programme using the Sequent supplied backup system. We were running on Sequent compuyters with Sequent disks. This is important. This was back in the 1990's
We also had a MASSIVE table. Gazzilions of rows that grew at a rate of round about a million per day. So we had a regime. Each month we create a new partition which we distributed over the disks. Older months tables were set to READ-ONLY, thus we knew queries would not take a lock. This all ran fine. Backups happened automatically. New partitions were created at month end and everyone was happy.
Right up until the Sequent engineer came in and wanted to takle a list of disk serial numbers. We thought he would know what he was doing, this being a vitally important (and not cheap) production data warehouse. He staretd at the front, and noted all the disks. We went round the back, opened the cabinet doors and knelt down to take the lower level disk IDs. And that was when he knocked the master power switch.
The disks all dropped off line, red lights flashed on the consoles, but he very quickly restored the power. The active partition was trashed, but thats OK, because we could restore from tape and roll forward. But the pervious months partitiions were not so lucky. But hey, we had Sequents backup program. Simply restore the damaged data and we are good, right?
WRONG! Most of our data was missing. It seems that Sequent does not backup a read only partition. We only kept about a months worths of backup because tapes were expensive, so when we restored and rolled forward we got tables spaces with loads of empty space. Major panic ensued because there was a regulatory reason for us having the data.
Sequent\'s did look into this. They scanned and scoured our backup tapes and eventually came up with a solution. Without any form of a lie, their solution to the missing data was to hand me, formally, an insert to our manual set that stated the backup solution they had sold us "Did not support readonly tablespaces".
And that was when we threw the Sequents out, ditdched Oracle and moved to DB2 on RS/6000 SP'2.