Chapter 17. Sybase Backup and Recovery

Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, or ASE, provides an excellent and easily understood set of server maintenance facilities. Unfortunately, there is no vendor-provided system for server maintenance, backups and restores, and alarming. You need to create your own server maintenance system, either with shell scripts or Perl. Luckily, this is not a complicated task. Your backup system can be scheduled via the Sybase job scheduler or a system scheduler. This chapter guides you through the process of creating your own backup system, using simple examples for illustration.

This chapter was contributed by Ed Barlow. Ed has been contributing to the Sybase community for over 15 years and offers a number of free tools at his web site http://www.edbarlow.com.

The fundamental structure of this chapter mirrors the other database chapters in this book. The purpose is not to replace Sybase documentation but to cover normal server maintenance, backup, and recovery in a concise and understandable manner. Rarely used and deprecated features are skipped to provide more space for the information you need to understand normal server maintenance. As with the other chapters, I first review the database architecture, then describe common terms. I then cover common utilities, commands, and procedures, continuing with a description of common maintenance, backup, and recovery tasks, including details on how to script them. I finish with a step-by-step disaster recovery procedure.

The Sybase server documentation is excellent. It is split into several "books," each of which documents a particular task. The three books you need to know about are the Adaptive Server Enterprise Reference Manual: Commands, which details the syntax of all the Sybase SQL commands; the System Administration Guide, which is an excellent guide to server administration; and the Troubleshooting and Error Messages Guide, which is a handy reference containing walkthroughs for the errors you might encounter. These manuals are stored at http://sybooks.sybase.com. Checking out the documentation should be your first instinct whenever you see an error message or want information on a task you do not understand. The online guides are well organized and easily searchable. The troubleshooting guide is particularly useful, allowing you to look up error messages and often giving a step-by-step fix. The Sybase documentation is free, easily accessible online, and very well written.

For the purposes of this chapter, the term maintenance scripts refers to all scripts that perform necessary dataserver maintenance. This includes database backups, database audits, database consistency checks, object-level backups, and running update statistics. I also include information on how to recover from backups.