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Re: RMAN Duplicate Question

From: Holger Baer <holger.baer_at_science-computing.de>
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 09:31:18 +0200
Message-ID: <dcv4k8$m7q$1@news.BelWue.DE>


amerar_at_iwc.net wrote:
> I must agree that using RMAN to back up is rather simple. But when it
> comes to restoring, there are several conditions which affect how and
> if you can perform the restore you want.
>
> The manual is not always clear on this. The manual says that to
> duplicate a database, the backup pieces must reside on the same host as
> the the auxiliary database. Why? "Because the manual says so?" What
> kind of answer is that?

Not it doesn't say that. They must be accessible. Read again. And the reason has been discussed at length in the RMAN - Curios question thread a few days ago.

[...]

>
> Bottom line is, RMAN is NOT straight forward in its operations, AND,
> like anything, posting a question may sometimes provide an answer, as
> it just did in my case.

Could you rephrase that to restore/recovery is not straight forward? Because as soon as I understood the process behind the scenes RMAN became pretty easy in my book.

Not that there aren't some fallacies with RMAN you've to learn, snewber mentioned some however depending on your environment you're not going to encounter them (service must be listed in listener.ora - that's the same with Intelligent Agent, so if using IA you won't hit that. You need a passwordfile - when using dbca you get one, you need the backup files on the host where the duplicate DB should reside - no different from a manual duplication etc.). One IMO really obscure shortcoming is that when a datafile was offline at the point you're restoring to, RMAN will happily recover/restore the datafile but won't take it online so the database doesn't open telling the file isn't accessible at this time...

But most people that blame RMAN for beeing difficult would fail a proper restore/recover cycle when on their own. Point is: when using RMAN you have to test and learn recovery, not backup. Backup is as easy as

        backup database;

There is not much to learn. But get someone to damage a test database without telling you what he did and learn to recover from that using whatever tool you like. I'll take RMAN over anything else.

Cheers,
Holger Received on Fri Aug 05 2005 - 02:31:18 CDT

Original text of this message

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