Easier Disaster Recovery with the RFUTIL AI Archiving Tool

Posted on: February 1, 2010 | By: SuperUser Account | QAD Business Process

With version 10 of the Openedge database, Progress has added a management tool for After Image files. This new tools simplifies the task of archiving and making After Image files available for re-use. It enables the period archiving of After Image on a user defined schedule, every 15 minutes, every hour, or whatever time period is required. During the archive function the current full extents are copied to a user defined directory and then marked empty. Ther is an option to do this manually as well.

The new management tool is part of the rfutil utility. There are several command and parameters that are associated with the archiving function:
• Enable AI Archiving: rfutil database –C aiarchiver enable.
• Change Default Archive interval: rfutil database –C aiarchiver setinterval nnn
• Change Default backup directory: rfutil database –C aiarchiver setdir path
• End AI Archiving: rfutil database –C aiarchiver end.
• Manual Archive: AI Archiving: rfutil database –C aiarchiver extent
The initial time and location of the archive process is defined by parameters when you start or backup your database:
• -aiacrdir – defines the archive directory.
• -aiarcinterval – defines the archive time period
• -enableaiarchiver – performs an aiarchiver enable when used as part of the probkup utility.
The archived After Image file is written with a unique name that will display chronologically when displayed using a directory list command. This also enables the roll forward function to use standard directory list commands when restoring to a database.
The archived file contains only the used blocks from the original After Image file. In other words if the After Image extents are define as fixed with a size of 100,000 blocks, and the last time the extent was only 20,000 blocks were used, then the archive file would only be 20,000 blocks in size, thus minimizing the amount of disk space required for archiving.
The archived files will be named using the following format:
directory~spec~database.backup-sequence.ai-sequence.extent-name
So if your databases name is /db/prod/mfgprod, aifter imagege extent 2, for sequence 99 would be named:
db~prod~mfgprod~99~02~mfgprod.a2
The addition of this functionality to the rfutil utility makes it easier to create and implement After Imaging as part of a comprehensive Disaster Recovery process.

---

---