cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Sybase IQ 16.0 SP04 - How to compress Backup

former_member217141
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Dear Gurus,

Our Sybase IQ backup size is 1.66 tb . We want to compress backup.

As i searching related below admin guides i couldt find any compress feature or command.

Is there any alternate way to take backup in smaller size ?

SyBooks Online

http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc00170.1540/doc/html/san12...


Sybase IQ version : 16.0 SP04

We are usin gSybase IQ for ETL Data Services and for other BO tools.


Best Regards

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

hans-juergen_schwindke
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

there is no IQ functionality to compress the backup. You have to compress it afterwards using os level commands.

Best regards,

Juergen

former_member217141
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Dear Hans,

Thank you for your reply.Our OS is Windows Server , could you please give an example os level procedure ?

As i my understand;

1- Take full backup IQ,

2- Then compress it via os level command

Best Regards

hans-juergen_schwindke
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

your understanding is correct.

I'm not a Windows expert and so I don't know the compression tool you have (winzip, winrar, 7zip, ...).

You could put everything into a bat file being executed by Windows task scheduler.

Best regards,

Juergen

former_member217141
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hello Hans,

Is there any official SAP tool to compress it ? Or there are only winrar, winzip and other standard compression tools.

Best Regards

hans-juergen_schwindke
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

I'm not aware of any SAP compression tool, maybe someone else reading this knows.

But on Linux level people are using standard os compression tools. So they take what they already have and do not introduce a new tool for IQ.

Best regards,

Juergen

c_baker
Employee
Employee
0 Kudos

Some of the available compression tools may have a source or target file size limit (e.g. 4GB with a 32-bit compressor).  What are the sizes of the stripes you are backing up to?

You will get some compression of the IQ backup files, but remember that IQ itself performs final buffer compression before writing the pages to disk anyway.  Any compression of the backup may be minimal or a waste of time/CPU cycles - so test.first.

Besides tools such as Winzip, etc, you may also want to investigate tools such as Cygwin, which has a 'tar' command (tar -cz for compression) compatible with Linux/Unix that can compress the stripes.

Also, If you are only wanting to compress to save disk space but not move the files, you might want to mark the NTFS file folder as compressible in Windows and backup the stripes directly to that folder, or copy to that folder later.

Chris

Answers (1)

Answers (1)

former_member194571
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Kemal,

the SAP official tool is SAPCAR [SAP Archiv - SAR-Datei mit SAPCAR entpacken], but I guess it's not significantly better or worse than any other .zip or .rar or whatever else compression utility.

I don't think you should expect too much from compression, regardless.

The content of the IQ backup archive consists of the catalog store (always completely, .db + .log) and the persistent IQ store (completely or partial, depending on the type of backup you execute). IQ data are stored with (sometimes double) compression applied anyway. The dictionary compression is optional, but storage level compression is applied to all data. Depending on the algorithm and parameters, some more compression could be possible, but I'd be very surprised if you can achieve a double digit percentage, since storage compression does a similar job anyway, transparently and on the fly. So the only part of your archive with a significant potential for compression is the catalog store, and the overall compression rate will depend on the mix of catalog store data and IQ data in the archive. If you follow the good practice of keeping your catalog store small, getting 70% out of 500 MB (as an example) will buy you 350 MB, which I consider too little to start the hassle with whatever packer you prefer.

I think the recommendation to keep the .log file short (which means you'll have to cut and re-start it occasionally) may over time be more benefitial than packing the archive.

HTH

Volker