RMAN incremental backups take a long time to complete when backing up RSA Identity Management and Governance 6.9.1
2 years ago
Originally Published: 2016-12-02
Article Number
000051520
Applies To
RSA Product Set: Identity Management and Governance 
RSA Version/Condition: 6.9.1
 
Issue
When performing RMAN incremental backups on an RSA  Identity Management and Governance 6.9.1 database, the incremental backups take much longer than expected and the backup files are much larger than expected.

 
Cause
Incremental backups on RSA  Identity Management and Governance 6.9.1 take longer than expected and are larger than expected due to the legacy logic that is in 6.9.1 collectors where we update the RUN_ID column for all active Collectors' data during every new collection run. So, essentially, collections modify storage blocks even when collected data does not change. This means that RMAN has to include active data into incremental backups even though the data is essentially unchanged.

 
Resolution
The recommended approach for backing up the RSA  Identity Management and Governance  database is to shutdown the RSA  Identity Management and Governance  application and export the database using the oracle export utility. See the RSA Identity Management & Governance 6.9.1 Installation Guide for more information on this utility.
Workaround
Migrate to 7.0+. RSA has made a big effort in the 7.0+ releases to minimize the footprint of the rows that get touched by Collectors. This means incremental backups will be much smaller and faster after migrating to 7.0+.