Last Sunday

Our production databases are backed up with one of two schedules.  Most days our backups are sent offsite and retained for 3 months before being returned.  But on the last Sunday of each month, our backups are archived for a longer period of time.  Therefore the RMAN backups and Veritas catalogs need to be retained for up to 7 years!

Us Linux DBAs love cron for scheduling jobs. These fancy software schedulers with their dependencies and clever logic have never really replaced a really dense, difficult to read crontab file. And that's just the way we like it in order to keep our jobs!

Now, crontab doesn't have a built-in facility for deciding whether a particular day is the 'last' or 'first' of the month (or quarter, or year).  Our current backup regime relies on a separate cron job to create a lock file, earlier in the day, then each individual backup script checks for existence of that file before deciding which tape schedule and retention policy to use.

I thought there was a slightly more elegant way of achieving this.  Here's what I came up with:

We have a simple script called islastsunday which compares the current date with the date of the last Sunday in the month (from the cal command).

#!/bin/bash
[ $(cal | awk '{print $1}' | tr -s '[:blank:]' '\n' | tail -1) = $(date +%d) ]

In our crontab file we have two entries for our backup, as follows:

# Check if day is LAST SUNDAY of Month. If NOT, run the regular backup
30 00 * * * islastsunday || (rman-job.sh level_0_tape ORCL > level_0_tape_ORCL.log 2>&1; rman-job.sh level_0_tape ORCL2 > level_0_tape_ORCL2.log 2>&1)
# Check if day is LAST SUNDAY of Month. If it IS, run the Monthly backup
30 00 * * * islastsunday && (rman-job.sh level_0_tape_LS ORCL > level_0_tape_LS_ORCL.log 2>&1; rman-job.sh level_0_tape_LS ORCL2 > level_0_tape_LS_ORCL2.log 2>&1)

Both schedules run at the same time, but only one of them will actually execute, depending upon the day of the month. The actual backup commands are bracketed, so that they are ALL dependent upon the islastsunday script, and will all run with the same retention policy, even if the backups continue to run after midnight (i.e. in Monday!).