Friday, June 17, 2011

DB2 Merge Backup: When some deltas make a full

I sometimes teach Data Management at university and one topic is backup strategies. We then discuss what is needed for a point-in-time recovery and what can be done to minimize the time needed for the recovery process. Full backups, incremental backups, delta backups, etc. are things to consider. Well, in a production environment having adequate maintenance windows to periodically take full backups, even online backups, could be a problem.

Some days ago DB2 Merge Backup become available. It combines incremental and delta backup to compute a full backup, so that taking such a full backup can be avoided. I just checked the product web page and a trial version is available. System requirements are DB2 LUW 9.5 or DB2 9.7 and it runs on most platforms.