Re: RMAN or not RMAN

Do you have to use a storage management software package? I'm just starting to play with RMAN, but the manual gave me the impression it would just write the backups to a regular file system (and assoc. disks).

Jay

--

Jay Strauss
jstrauss_at_bazillion.com
(h) 773.935.5326
(c) 312.617.0264

"Bill Border" <bb22_at_uswest.net> wrote in message
news:LjFF5.456$_24.82670_at_news.uswest.net...


> Hi,

>

>  We have been using RMAN (with Veritas) for about 9 months to backup

> about 150 Oracle DB's daily. Most of the problems that we have encountered

> have been with Veritas, not RMAN.

>

>  As far as it being difficult to use, we invested the time before the

> production rollout to test RMAN and gain an understanding of how it

> works. It really does greatly simplify the entire process. For example

> when doing a point in time restore, we supply the timestamp that we

> want to restore to and RMAN automatically determines which full,

 incremental


> and archive logs to restore, it restores them to the server and runs the

> necessary Oracle commands. Cool!

>

>  Before you run a backup or restore, you must tell RMAN to allocate

> channels. Every channel is a parallel stream to your storage management

> software, so that it how you get parallelism. How many streams that you

> can run seems to be more of a storage management software limitation than

> an Oracle limitation.

>

>  There are a few gotchas. For example if you add a datafile, you must

> immediately backup the newly created datafile or you will not be able to

> rollforward through the time when the datafile was added.

>

>  Feel free to email me at bb22_at_uswest.net if you have any questions.

>

>  If this response has been helpful, you can repay me by visiting:

> http://dbamon.com

>

> Regards,

> Bill

>

> --

> Bill Border

> Agilent Technologies

> bb22_at_uswest.net

> Low-Cost, UX-Based Oracle/Informix/MSSQL Monitor: http://dbamon.com

>

>

>

>

> Scott Watson wrote in message ...

> >I was wondering if RMAN is really used or if DBA's are using shell

 scripts


> >to perform backup and recovery.

> >

> >Are there any real performance improvements to using RMAN.  The big issue

> >that keeps coming up in the doc that I have read is it can be done in

> >parallel, but I am not exactly sure what that means since I can always

 open


> >another telnet session and recover other datafiles and therfore my

 recovery


> >is being done in parallel??

> >

> >Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

> >

> >Thanks,

> >scott.

> >

> >

> >

>

>