Overview - Sybase iDataAgent

Introduction

The Sybase iDataAgent provides an unique, simplified end-to-end backup and recovery solution for Sybase system and user databases in your enterprise. In addition to complete protection of the system databases which contain user database characteristics, file locations etc., it also provides more granular backup and recovery  of your enterprise’s data, related administration files and transaction logs.

Key features

Full Range of Backup and Recovery Options

The Sybase iDataAgent provides the flexibility to backup the Sybase server which consists of system and user databases in different environments. This is very essential since the Sybase system and user databases are always subject to constant changes.

You can perform a full or transaction log backup of the entire Sybase Server at any point of time. The following section describes the backups that can be performed in different environments.

Database Backups

You can backup both the system and user-defined databases. You can comprehensively backup all the databases in an instance or schedule backups for the individual databases. You can also auto-discover new databases to comprehensively manage the backup of all databases in your environment.

Transaction Log Backups

You also have the facility to backup only the transaction logs when the database is online. These logs can be applied to an online backup and recover the database to the current point-in-time. A transaction log backup contains only the new changes since the full or another transaction log backup. Each time a transaction log is backed up it is truncated to the exact time of the backup. No checkpoint is issued at this time, therefore dirty pages are not written to disk before or after a transaction log backup. Any transactions that are not completed at the time a transaction log backup is performed are rolled back during a restore involving a transaction log backup.

Transaction Log Backup of a Damaged Database

If a database fails and any data is lost, you will want to restore it to the point of failure. Sybase iDataAgent allows you to capture all transaction log events that occurred after the last backup job was performed.

You can also protect the non-database files and profiles using the appropriate File System iDataAgent.

Backup and Recovery Failovers

In the event that a MediaAgent used for the backup or recovery operation fails, it is automatically resumed on alternate MediaAgents. In such cases, the backup or restore job will not restart from the beginning, but will resume from the point of failure. This is especially useful for backups and restores of large amount of data.

In the event, that a network goes down, the backup and recovery jobs are resumed on alternate data paths. Similarly, in the event of a device failure, the jobs are automatically switched to alternate disk and tape drives.

Efficient Job Management and Reporting

You can view and verify the status of backup and recovery operations from the Job Controller and Event Viewer windows within the CommCell Console. You can also track the status of the jobs using Reports, which can be saved and easily distributed. Reports can be generated for different aspects of data management. You also have the flexibility to customize the reports to display only the required data and save them to any specified location in different formats. For example, you can create a backup job summary report to view at-a-glance the completed backup jobs.

In addition, you can also schedule these reports to be generated and send them on email without user intervention. 

Block Level Deduplication

Deduplication provides a smarter way of storing data by identifying and eliminating the duplicate items in a data protection operation.

Deduplication at the data block level compares blocks of data against each other. If an object (file, database, etc.) contains blocks of data that are identical to each other, then block level deduplication eliminates storing the redundant data and reduces the size of the object in storage. This way dramatically reduces the backup data copies on both the disk and tapes.

Terminology

The Sybase iDataAgent documentation uses the following terminology:

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