Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference

Managing multiple target databases

In an ideal RMAN world, all production databases would be on the same version, and there would be no compatibility or upgrade issues. But as you know, this is rarely the case. It’s more likely that you will deal with target databases that span Oracle versions from 8.0.4 to 9.0.x. If that’s the case, you have some choices to make.

Each choice has a positive or negative impact on the level of compatibility and on the maintenance issues that are likely to appear. The trick, of course, is to make the appropriate choice for your organization, and in doing so, limit the downside effects. The nature of your choices is driven by three independent variables:

• The version of the target database

• The version of the catalog database

• The version of the objects created within the catalog schema

With this said, your options for creating a catalog to handle multiple targets implemented using multiple versions can be boiled down to the following:

• Use a version-specific catalog database and a catalog schema based on that version for each target database.

• Use one catalog database with version-specific catalog schemas for the different targets.

• Use one catalog database for all your target databases, created with the highest version of Oracle available, and a catalog schema created with the corresponding highest version of the rman binary.