New transactions during a Sybase "dump database" command I have a Sybase 15.5 database which is backed up every night using the DUMP DATABASE command.  The process takes about 30 minutes.

What happens to the transactions that occur within those 30 minutes?  Are they included in the backup or ignored?
The dump process happens in 3 phases:


All data and log pages are dumped.
Data pages modified during phase 1 by non-logged operations are dumped.
Log pages are dumped again.


Everything happening until end of phase 2 are contained in the dump. But the changes performed during phase 3 will be missing. Of course phase 3 is pretty fast, so the chances are that you'll not be missing anything. You can check the state of your transaction log after the dump. If anthing is in there, then you know these transactions are not in the dump.

But of course transactions happening afterwards will not be in the dump either so I guess it's not much of an issue.

If your concern is that you dump multiple databases and the dumps might be out of sync, you should consider using quiesce database.