Recovery Manager (RMAN)
Oracle’s Recovery Manager (RMAN), introduced with Oracle8, is a utility that allows you to create backups of your Oracle database and to restore your Oracle database from these backups. Although many of RMAN’s operations can be performed with the other methods described in this chapter, RMAN provides some significant advantages over user-managed backup and recovery, including:
Performing a backup without having to put the database in backup mode
Performing an incremental backup of only changed data blocks
Automatically tracking and logging backup operations
Automatically detecting block corruption during backup
Reporting on backup operations
Performing block media recovery
RMAN is clearly the backup and recovery strategy of the future. Recently, Oracle has been adding such backup features as block media recovery and tablespace point-in-time recovery only to RMAN.
The following sections describe the use of RMAN. We’ll look briefly at basic RMAN concepts, the command-line options used to start and use RMAN, and a sample RMAN command script that you can use to perform a backup of an Oracle database. We’ll then describe the RMAN commands.