RMAN 8i - Restore problem

Hi, all.

Still working through RMAN permutations, and running into another wall. Checked Metalink, which ran me square into ANOTHER wall.

Here's the situation:

I am not using a recovery catalog.

I made a Full backup of a database, and subsequent incremental backups over the next several hours, interspersed with measured data changes for reference - I'm trying to do an incomplete restore, using the data changes as verification of what point I've restored to.

I did this successfully last week - part of the process after the restore was to ALTER DATABASE OPEN RESETLOGS.

I now want to do _another_ incomplete recovery, just to re-validate my process.

I attempted to do a restore, with the UNTIL TIME parameter set to a point roughly in the middle of my whole incremental process last week.

I get a message: "RMAN-20207: UNTIL TIME is before RESETLOGS time"

It occurred to me that yes, I did do a RESETLOGS after the first incomplete recovery - so I went digging on Metalink, which had this to say:

"You need to 'reset database to incarnation <key>' to synchronise the
catalog with what the target has been restored to. The incarnations (Inc keys) of the database can be determined with the 'list incarnation of database <dbname>'; command."

So, I ran the LIST INCARNATIONS OF DATABASE <SID> command, which returned the following:

"command not allowed when not connected to a recovery catalog"

So - Do I conclude that multiple attempts at incomplete restore/recovery of one database in this fashion cannot be done without a catalog?

Let's say for argument's sake, I have a database with some corruption that I think happened last Wednesday - I do an incomplete recovery to Tuesday, and find that the corruption is still there - I want to do another incomplete recovery back to Monday - am I out of luck unless I use a catalog?

I can't really see a situation where I'd need this functionality in the real world; I'm just trying to establish what I can and cannot do...

Thanks for all insights.

BD Received on Tue Sep 27 2005 - 14:30:17 CDT