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Message Posted: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 @ 21:42:57 GMT

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Strictly speaking, there are no incremental backups in Teradata, for reasons that I won't go into.

Arcmain (the underlying archive utility) can back up whole objects only, with two exceptions: (1) you can back up only certain partitions of a partitioned table; (2) you can back up certain clusters or AMPs. Note that this is a constraint in the utility itself, not in NetBackup or NetVault.

The usual recommendation, therefore, is to partition your larger tables in such a way that newly loaded data goes into only a few partitions -- by "transaction date", maybe. Then you can back up only those partitions.

(Option 2 allows you to back up large tables faster by writing to multiple tape drives simultaneously. It doesn't help with incremental backups.)

As you mentioned, putting a permanent journal on a table does allow you to checkpoint the state of the table at any time and then back up only what has happened since that moment. For a few critical tables, this might be an option. For my part, I find journaling to be a lot of trouble with little benefit.

Anything beyond these options would have to be custom-coded. Hope this makes sense...

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