Learn how to leverage this new functionality
of dump history file support to improve your validated sync efficiency and timeflow flexibility—all with the flick of a switch.
This article was originally published on the Delphix website here November 5, 2019.
If you are a customer virtualizing ASE data on Delphix, then this post is for you. Dump history, for the purposes of running validated sync, has usurped the venerable backup history log as the new face of validated sync for ASE on Delphix.
Earlier this year, in our 5.3.4 maintenance release, Delphix introduced a major feature for ASE: dump history file support. The feature marks a great improvement in how Delphix identifies and ingests database dumps, resulting in an improved experience around validated sync and an improved timeflow.
A History Dump on Dump History
Dump history files were introduced in ASE 15.7 SP100 as a means of recording dump database (both full and cumulative) and dump transaction commands that were executed against a database—allowing a much easier recovery mechanism than was previously available (e.g. backup history files). It marked a vast improvement for ASE users and partners to gather rich contextual information on DB backups.
Parlaying this into the world of Delphix, dump history is a major improvement in how Delphix ingests from source databases using validated Sync, which monitors new backups that are available on a source ASE database. Prior to this, Delphix used backup history logs that worked fine for all intents and purposes, but we anticipate ASE customers to see major improvements with dump history.
Major Benefits
There are two major advantages that come with enabling dump history:
- Greater performance with validated sync. With more detailed metadata (e.g., timestamps, host locations, striping configurations) associated with dump history files, validated sync has far less operational overhead in identifying and ingesting the appropriate backup than what was previously done with backup history. In short, validated sync will run much more efficiently.
- Improved timeflow flexibility. dSource timeflows now have the ability to recover from missed dumps. In the case where a dump is missing (e.g. missed connection or corrupted file), validated sync will pause and continue to look for the missing backup file(s). This process will throw a fault after a number of attempts at locating the correct file but continue to search until the correct file is located. Previously, if a file was missing, validated sync would omit the file and try ingesting an out-of-sequence backup—resulting in a sequence error.
Getting Started
Taking advantage of the improved validated sync for ASE is simple:
- Upgrade to 5.3.4 or later
- Verify you’re running ASE 15.7 SP100 or beyond.
- Ensure that dump history is active on your source databases
For more information, check out our documentation center on ASE dump history here.