How does RMAN handle excluded TS on RESTORE?

Hey all,

In our development 10.1.0.5.0 DB on AIX, we have multiple copies of data for the various stages of development. This data has been deemed to not have enough value to warrant the high cost of backup (it's at about 3x the size of production). However, other data in the development database is critical to development.

So, after researching options, I came across the CONFIGURE EXCLUDE command in RMAN and I'm testing it now. For backup, it works as advertised, however the documentation for database recovery is a little sketchy.

For example, let's say we have user tablespaces T1, T2, T3, and T4. I have this in RMAN:

CONFIGURE EXCLUDE FOR TABLESPACE 'T3';
CONFIGURE EXCLUDE FOR TABLESPACE 'T4'; Full backups run fine with the exclusion. For testing I have deleted all datafiles and tempfiles (redo, control, and archive are intact). To restore, I issue:

RECOVER DATABASE SKIP FOREVER TABLESPACE 'T3','T4'; ...and all seems well. However, the docs say that the "SKIP FOREVER" option has this effect:

RMAN specifies the DROP option of ALTER DATABASE DATAFILE ... OFFLINE when taking the datafiles that belong to the tablespace offline before the restore.

But in practice, the datafiles are still listed in V$DATAFILE and their associated tablespaces are still ONLINE. So, now I need to drop and recreate the tablespaces.

That's no big deal -- I fully expected to have to manually recreate the excluded tablespaces -- but as there doesn't seem to be much on database recovery after using EXCLUDE, I'd like some opinions.

Thoughts?
Rich

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