RMAN [Oracle]

RMAN is a program that helps to manage backing up, restoring and recovering databases, or more accurately their datafiles.

Features

While backing up, restoring and recovering are possible with user managed backup recovery, RMAN also has some additional features:

Incremental backup
Block media recover
Unused block compression
Binary compression

Starting RMAN

RMAN is located under ORACLE_HOME/bin

rman TARGET / CATALOG catalog_user/catlog_pwd@catalog_db
rman TARGET sys/sys_pwd@target_db
rman

Terminology

Target database

In RMAN's terminology, the database on which it is operated (that is backed up, restored or recovered) is called the target database. One recovery catalog can manage multiple target databases.

Channel

A channel is a connection (session) from RMAN to a target database. These connections, or channels, are used to actually perform the desired operations.

Physical standby databases

RMAN can use physical standby databases to make backups. This saves valuable resources on the primary database.

Links

Scripts: RMAN backup history (char based) and RMAN backup history (html based).

RMAN related dynamic views.

Thanks

Thanks to Peter Munro who pointed out two errors on this page.