My First Published Article (2002): OS Snapshots for Backup in the NOCOUG Journal

Before blogging existed as a medium, technical knowledge in the Oracle and database world traveled through a different circuit: user group newsletters, conference proceedings, and mailing lists. If you had something worth saying, you wrote it up and submitted it to a publication. One of the most respected of those publications was the NoCOUG Journal, the quarterly newsletter of the Northern California Oracle Users Group.

NoCOUG was founded in the late 1980s and became one of the premier Oracle user groups in the world. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the heart of the enterprise technology industry, it drew some of the sharpest Oracle practitioners around. The group ran four full-day technical conferences a year and published the NoCOUG Journal quarterly, filled with deep technical how-to articles written by practitioners for practitioners. Getting published in it wasn’t a vanity exercise; it was a peer review. People read it because the content was genuinely useful.

In May 2002, Vol. 16, No. 2, I had my first article published there: “OS Snapshots for Backup: Utilizing operating system snapshots for quick and painless Oracle database backup and restore.” The premise was straightforward but under-appreciated at the time: instead of relying entirely on expensive tape backups and long backup windows, you could use OS-level filesystem snapshots, specifically Linux LVM or hardware volume managers, to dramatically reduce backup time. Freeze I/O briefly, snapshot the volume, release I/O, then back up the redo logs. The database backup window drops from hours to seconds.

Looking back at 2002: I had more hair, less cloud experience, and apparently a lot to say about backup strategies. What I didn’t know then was how durable that idea would turn out to be. Years later I found myself writing about the same technique applied to PostgreSQL (pg_start_backup / pg_stop_backup) and MongoDB (fsync + lock), and it’s the foundation of how most cloud databases handle snapshots today. The technology changed, the insight didn’t.

You can read the full article here: OS Snapshots for Backup (PDF)

I later wrote a follow-up post in 2010 noting that the technique was still very much valid, applicable well beyond Oracle. Some ideas have a longer shelf life than others.