Please forgive me if this is a silly question. I am an Oracle DBA now with UDB responsibilities.

In Oracle, you can not just take a file-level backup of a database that is open and use that to restore your database... You must either put the database/tablespace in BACKUP mode (if logging) , or shut down the instance.

I just found out that our Development team/Unix Admins have been doing file-system backups while the UDB instance/databases were open.. but with NO activity. Is it possible to lay that file-system backup down and then import data from our export file? We are not in recovery mode. But if we were in recovery mode, would it work? My instinct and experience as an Oracle DBA says no way, but maybe I'm wrong. Can anyone help?

This is just a dev system, so it's not a big deal, and I am in progress of putting REAL backups in the schedule, but I was just curious if what they were doing would even work!

Thanks!
Jodie

Its remcommend to us DB2 backup to do that work, even thought there may be no activitiy on the DB, DB2 may not of written all the info back to disk it could still be in memory.

Thanks. That's what I thought!