RE: BDB recovery after power outage

["Mark H. Wood" <mwood@IUPUI.Edu>]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
> --On Monday, April 21, 2003 3:21 PM -0400 Frank Swasey
> <Frank.Swasey@uvm.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > 1) What is required to set up the BDB Environment optimally for OpenLDAP
> > usage?
>
> This differs for every setup.  What is best for our DB may not be best for
> yours.

An important point.  There is no cookbook answer.  However, it seems that
there could be a list of things to think about.

> > 2) What is the daily process(es) that should be done to maintain the
> > health of a BDB?
>
> Ours maintains its health with no intervention from us.

Really?  You don't archive logs?  You don't take backups?  You don't run
the deadlock-breaker?

> > 3) OMG the power went out!  To recover the BDB, I do?
>
> I'd hope you made backups, either with BDB's tools to do so, or by
> exporting your DB to LDIF... same as with any application's data.

So, let's see, do we make backups of BDB using db_dump or db_archive?
The answer seems to be, "yes."  Which to use now?  You see the problem?
Frank can't just hope;  he has to *know* how to do this, and when, and
why.  It turns out that the trail of breadcrumbs in the Sleepycat
documentation is rather sparse in this area -- it takes a bit of creative
suspicion to find your way to the procedural recommendations.

Then there are the little matters, like, what are the consequences w.r.t.
OpenLDAP of doing hot versus standard backups, since hot backups don't
require you to take the LDAP service down but leave you uncertain of just
what was backed up?  Some discussion of things like that, by those who
know (not me, yet!), would be a welcome addition to the OpenLDAP
documentation since it may indeed be specific to the way that OpenLDAP
uses the DBMS.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood@IUPUI.Edu
MS Windows *is* user-friendly, but only for certain values of "user".