Newbie RMAN question: recovery catalogue

Hi,

We have no DBA, and I have the dubious honour of managing a few new Oracle databases. The environment is Solaris 10 on SPARC in a two-node Sun Cluster, embedded Oracle 10.2.0.2 (i.e. supplied by our software vendor), Tivoli Storage Manager for backups. There will be a total of five Oracle instances.

I've trawled through the RMAN documentation on Oracle's website, but I just want to be absolutely sure I understand a few things before I start implementing the backups. The main one is:

• Do I need a recovery catalogue? Is it possible to recover without one if I lose absolutely everything? (I'd rather avoid having to buy an Oracle license just to run the catalogue)

Many thanks for any help or advice. There may be more daft questions as the project progresses!

Cheers
- Ian

-- 
Ian Chard, Senior Unix and Network Admin  |  E: ian.chard_at_sers.ox.ac.uk
Systems and Electronic Resources Service  |  T:  80587 / (01865) 280587
Oxford University Library Services        |  F:          (01865) 242287