Re: Question - RMAN 8i - Catalog or control file?

No reason to beat yourself up, it's a legitimate question. As you've found, there are only a few things catalog can give you, and only your business needs decision makers can decide if they are important.

Of course, being on 8i is an indicator that the decision makers have an odd view of things.

You might also look into the OMS. It can make pretty pictures for management to evaluate your db performance. And once you have that db, you might as well add RMAN to it, eh? It's really not all that hard to add another small db when you already have several.

For most smaller sites, nocatalog is just fine IMHO. You probably want to backup controfile to trace, too. So, within my rman backup script I have sql "alter database backup controlfile to trace"; and then after rman is done:

(cd ${ORACLE_BASE}/admin/${ORACLE_SID}/udump; cp $(ls -t $(fgrep -l 'CREATE CONTROLFILE' *.trc)|head -1) ${FLASH_AREA}/controlfile.txt )
# This gets the backup controlfile to trace from udump that is done
during the
# backup. So a cleanup of udump is ok whenever desired, and you don't
have
# to worry about tracing every time you make a change to the db.

I also don't like removing archived logs as soon as they are backed up, I'd rather wait a couple backup cycles if I have the space.

jg

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