Re: How popular is RMAN for backup?

Be afraid! Be very afraid!!

Anyone who tells you RMAN is a bugger to use is (1) honest and (2) hiding their own ignorance.

It *does* have a learning curve that puts Everest to shame. True.

Oracle's own courses squeeze RMAN into the last part of the last day of a 4 day course. True.

BUT... it's big, saving graces are (a) you do not get block-level redo being generated whilst performing hot backups, and hence there is minimal performance impact on the database; (2) parallelization of backups means they don't take forever; (3) skipping of unused blocks mean backup0s are considerably smaller than one done using O/S techniques would be; (4) -and don't underestimate this one- the fact that RMAN can spot corrupt Oracle blocks means that any backup that succeeds is guaranteed capable of being used for recovery.

As to your original question: how popular is it? I've taught backup and recovery for about 2 years now. In the dim and dark days of 1999, no-one was using it, and all instructors skipped through 4 chapters on it in around 1 hour or less. These days, I have 30 or 40% of my students expressing a desire to know more about it, and we spend half or more of a day on those same 4 chapters. I n short, it is becoming increasingly used (I would say), and largely for the reasons I've outlined above.

Regards
HJR <dominica_at_secondhat.com> wrote in message news:9iiqom$pkt$1_at_secondhat.secondhat.com...
> Hi Everyone,
>
> How popular is using RMAN for Oracle backup?
>
> I use to write my own dynamic script to generate
> which tablespaces and redo logs files to be
> backed-up for HOTBACKUP.
>
> And my friend recently tell me RMAN become more
> and more popular and I am trying to learn RMAN now.
>
> But very curious how do other senior Oracle DBA like RMAN.
>
> I think it is pretty confusing to me for now.
>
> Please email me directly to dominica_at_secondhat.com
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
>
> Dominica
>
>
Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 16:32:32 CDT