Re: Newbie RMAN question: recovery catalogue

Ian Chard wrote:
> 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

Many people at Oracle state you don't need one. There is one precaution of course: you should make sure you AUTOBACKUP your controlfile and use a SPFILE. If you don't have a catalog database the backup info is in the controlfile, so you absolutely need to have a proper backup of the controlfile.

As to a license: licenses are based on Named Users or Universal Power Units (read CPU). How many databases you create on a single server doesn't influence your license.

With 5 instances I would probably still use a catalog database. Do you want to connect to 5 different instances to retrieve backup information?

-- 
Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA