[Misc]

This section collects basic settings, including the name and location of your backup. The section also indicates whether you are keeping more than a single backup file, as specified by the restorePointLimit parameter.

Parameter Description
drop_foreign_constraints

When set to true, all foreign key constraints are unconditionally dropped during object-level restore. This allows you to restore database objects independent of their foreign key dependencies.

You must set objectRestoreMode to coexist, or Vertica ignores this setting.

Default: false

enableFreeSpaceCheck

Boolean, if set to true (default) or omitted, vbr confirms that the specified backup locations contain sufficient free space to allow a successful backup. If a backup location has insufficient resources, vbr displays an error message and cancels the backup. If vbr cannot determine the amount of available space or number of nodes in the backup directory, it displays a warning and continues with the backup.

Default: true

excludeObjects

Identifies database objects and wildcards patterns to exclude from the set specified by includeObjects. Unicode characters are case-sensitive; others are not.

You can only use this parameter with includeObjects.

hadoop_conf_dir

Eon Mode on HDFS with high availability (HA) nodes only, the directory path containing the XML configuration files copied from Hadoop.

If the vbr operation includes more than one HA HDFS cluster, use a colon-separated list to provide the directory paths to the XML configuration files for each HA HDFS cluster. For example:

hadoop_conf_dir = path/to/xml-config-hahdfs1:path/to/xml-config-hahdfs2

This value must match the HadoopConfDir value set in the bootstrapping file created during installation.

includeObjects

Identifies database objects and wildcards patterns to include with a backup task. You can use this parameter together with excludeObjects. Unicode characters are case-sensitive; others are not.

The includeObjects and objects parameters are mutually exclusive.

kerberos_keytab_file

Eon Mode on HDFS only, the location of the keytab file that contains credentials for the Vertica Kerberos principal.

This value must match the KerberosKeytabFile value set in the bootstrapping file created during installation.

kerberos_realm

Eon Mode on HDFS only, the realm portion of the Vertica Kerberos principal.

This value must match the KerberosRealm value set in the bootstrapping file created during installation.

kerberos_service_name

Eon Mode on HDFS only, the service name portion of the Vertica Kerberos principal.

This value must match the KerberosServiceName value set in the bootstrapping file created during installation.

Default: vertica

objectRestoreMode

Specifies how vbr handles objects of the same name when restoring schema or table backups, one of the following:

  • createOrReplace: vbr creates any objects that do not exist. If an object does exist, vbr overwrites it with the version from the archive.
  • create: vbr creates any objects that do not exist and does not replace existing objects. If an object being restored does exist, the restore fails.
  • coexist: vbr creates the restored version of each object with a name formatted as follows:
    backup_timestamp_objectname

    This approach allows existing and restored objects to exist simultaneously. If the appended information pushes the schema name past the maximum length of 128 characters, Vertica truncates the name. You can perform a reverse lookup of the original schema name by querying the system table TRUNCATED_SCHEMATA.

In all modes, vbr restores data with the current epoch. Object restore mode settings do not apply to backups and full restores.

Default: createOrReplace

objects

For an object-level backup or object replication, specifies the object (schema or table) names to include. To specify more than one object, enter multiple names in a comma-delimited list. If you specify no objects, vbr creates a full backup.

This parameter cannot be used together with the parameters includeObjects and excludeObjects.

You specify objects as follows:

  • Specify table names in the form schema.objectname. For example, to make backups of the table customers from the schema finance, enter:

    finance.customers

    If a public table and a schema have the same name, vbr backs up only the schema. Use the schema.objectname convention to avoid confusion.

  • Object names can include UTF-8 alphanumeric characters. Object names cannot include escape characters, single- (') or double-quote (") characters.

  • Specify non-alphanumeric characters with a backslash (\) followed by a hex value. For instance, if the table name is my table (my followed by a space character, then table), enter the object name as follows:

    objects=my\20table
  • If an object name includes a period, enclose the name with double quotes.

To identify objects with wildcards, use the includeObjects/excludeObjects parameters.

passwordFile

The path name of the password configuration file.

This parameter is ignored if dbUseLocalConnection is set to true.

restorePointLimit

Number of earlier backups to retain with the most recent backup. If set to 1 (the default), Vertica maintains two backups: the latest backup and the one before it.

vbr saves multiple backups to the same location, which are shared through hard links. In such cases, the listbackup task displays the common backup prefix with unique time and date suffixes:

my_archive20111111_205841

Default: 1

snapshotName

Base name of the backup used in the directory tree structure that vbr creates for each node, containing up to 240 characters limited to the following:

  • a–z
  • A–Z
  • 0–9
  • Hyphen (-)
  • Underscore (_)

Each iteration in this series (up to restorePointLimit) consists of snapshotName and the backup timestamp. Each series of backups should have a unique and descriptive snapshot name. Full and object-level backups cannot share names. For most vbr tasks, snapshotName serves as a useful identifier in diagnostics and system tables. For object restore and replication tasks, snapshotName is used to build schema names in coexist mode operations.

Default: snapshotName

tempDir

Specifies an absolute path to a temporary storage area on the cluster nodes. The tmp path must be the same on all database cluster nodes. vbr uses this directory as temporary storage for log files, lock files, and other bookkeeping information while it copies files from the source cluster node to the destination backup location. vbr also writes backup logs to this location.

Do not use the same location as your database's data or catalog directory. Unexpected files and directories in your data or catalog location can cause errors during database startup or restore.

The file system at this location must support fcntl lockf (POSIX) file locking.

Default: /tmp/vbr