Preface

Welcome to the world of Oracle backup and recovery. This guide includes the conceptual and task-oriented information you will need to perform backup, restore, and recovery procedures whether you use the Recovery Manager utility or operating system commands.

Note: The Oracle8i Backup and Recovery Guide contains information that describes the features and functionality of the Oracle8i Standard Edition and the Oracle8i Enterprise Edition products. The Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition have the same basic features, but several advanced features are available only with the Enterprise Edition, and some of these are optional. For example, to use Recovery Manager to perform automated tablespace point-in-time recovery, you must have the Enterprise Edition. For information about the differences between Oracle8i Standard Edition and the Oracle8i Enterprise Edition and the features and options that are available to you, please refer to Getting to Know Oracle8i.

Structure

Part / Chapter	Contents
PART 1	Developing a Backup and Recovery Strategy
Chapter 1, "What Is Backup and Recovery?"	Offers a general overview of backup and recovery concepts and methods.
Chapter 2, "Managing Data Structures"	Describes how to manage control files, online redo logs, and archived redo logs for backup and recovery.
Chapter 3, "Developing a Backup and Recovery Strategy"	Provides guidelines for developing a backup and recovery strategy.
PART 2	Using Recovery Manager
Chapter 4, "Recovery Manager Concepts"	Describes the features and functionality of the Recovery Manager utility.
Chapter 5, "Getting Started with Recovery Manager"	Describes how to start using Recovery Manager, including whether you should use a recovery catalog, how you can execute commands, and how to connect to a target database.
Chapter 6, "Managing Recovery Manager Metadata"	Describes how to manage RMAN metadata using either a recovery catalog or the control file.
Chapter 7, "Generating Lists and Reports with Recovery Manager"	Describes how to generate lists of your backups and copies and reports describing which datafiles need to be backed up, which backups are obsolete, and the structure of the database schema at a specified time.
Chapter 8, "Making Backups and Copies with Recovery Manager"	Describes how to make backup and image copies of datafiles, control files, and archived redo logs using Recovery Manager.
Chapter 9, "Restoring and Recovering with Recovery Manager"	Describes how to restore backups and copies of datafiles, control files, and archived redo logs and perform media recovery on datafiles.
Chapter 10, "Creating a Duplicate Database with Recovery Manager"	Describes how to create a duplicate of your target database on either a local or remote host using backups of your target database datafiles.
PART 3	Recovery Manager Reference
Chapter 11, "Recovery Manager Command Syntax"	Provides syntax diagrams, parameter descriptions, and code samples for all RMAN commands.
Chapter 12, "Recovery Catalog Views"	Describes the views available with a recovery catalog.
PART 4	Using O/S Commands for Backup and Recovery
Chapter 13, "Performing Operating System Backups"	Provides step-by-step instructions for performing operating system backups.
Chapter 14, "Performing Operating System Recovery"	Provides step-by-step instructions for performing media recovery using operating system commands.
Chapter 15, "Operating System Recovery Scenarios"	Describes the procedures for performing media recovery in several common scenarios.
Chapter 16, "Managing a Standby Database"	Explains how to plan, create, and maintain a standby database.
Appendix A, "Performing Tablespace Point-in-Time Recovery with Recovery Manager"	Provides planning guidelines and step-by-step instructions for performing tablespace point-in-time recovery with Recovery Manager.
Appendix B, "Performing Operating System Tablespace Point-in-Time Recovery"	Provides planning guidelines and step-by-step instructions for manually performing tablespace point-in-time recovery.

This book contains the following parts and chapters.

Audience

This guide is for DBAs who administer the backup, restore, and recovery operations of an Oracle database system.

Knowledge Assumed of the Reader

Readers of this guide are assumed to be familiar with relational database concepts and basic database administration. They are also assumed to be familiar with the operating system environment under which they are running Oracle.

Conventions

This section explains the conventions used in this manual including the following:

• Text

• Syntax diagrams and notation

• Code examples

Text

This section explains the conventions used within the text:

UPPERCASE Characters

Uppercase text is used to call attention to tablespace names, initialization parameters, and SQL keywords.

For example, "If you create a private rollback segment, the name must be included in the ROLLBACK_SEGMENTS parameter of the init.ora file. You can view this information by issuing a SHOW PARAMETER statement in SQL*Plus."

Italicized Characters

Italicized words within text are book titles, new vocabulary, emphasized words, or variables in SQL or Recovery Manager syntax.

For example, "An archived redo log is an online redo log that has been copied offline. You must run your database in ARCHIVELOG mode to enable this feature. If you are using Recovery Manager, you can specify an archived redo log in a backup command by using the archivelog like '/oracle/archive/arc_*' sub-clause."

Bold Characters

Bold words within text are Recovery Manager keywords or operating system-specific commands.

For example, "Use the Recovery Manager backup command to back up your database. Alternatively, use the UNIX cp command to copy files."

Monospaced Characters

Filenames and directories appear in a monospaced font. Also, monospaced characters in text preceding a code example indicates a filename or keyword used in the sample code.

For example, "This command backs up the tablespace TBS_1:

run {
     allocate channel c1 type disk;
     backup tablespace tbs_1;
}

Recovery Manager Syntax Diagrams and Notation

For information about Recovery Manager syntax conventions, see "Conventions Used in this Reference".

Code Examples

SQL, SQL*Plus, and Recovery Manager commands and statements appear separated from the text of paragraphs in a monospaced font. For example:

INSERT INTO emp (empno, ename) VALUES (1000, 'SMITH'); 
ALTER TABLESPACE users ADD DATAFILE 'users2.ora' SIZE 50K; 
run {
     allocate channel ch1 type disk;
     backup database;
}

When you run RMAN from the command line, the command prompt appears as RMAN>. When you issue commands from the SQL*Plus command line, the prompt appears as SQL>. These prompts are displayed in the code examples only when they are necessary to prevent confusion.

You can execute SQL, SQL*Plus, and RMAN commands in different environments on different platforms. As much as possible, this guide attempts to provide generic documentation, that is, documentation that is not specific to any operating system or interface. Nevertheless, it is sometimes necessary for illustrative purposes to show how the syntax works at the O/S level. In these cases, this book uses examples from a UNIX command-line interface and employs the % symbol to indicate the O/S prompt. For example:

% rman target / rcvcat rman/rman@inst2
RMAN> startup

How to Use This Guide

Every reader of this guide is presumed to have read:

• The beginning of the Oracle8i Concepts manual, which provides an overview of the concepts and terminology related to Oracle and a foundation for the more detailed information in this guide. The rest of the Oracle8i Concepts manual explains the Oracle architecture and features in detail.

• The chapters in the Oracle8i Administrator's Guide that deal with managing the control file, online redo logs, and archived redo logs.

You will often need to refer to the following reference guides:

• Oracle8i SQL Reference

• Oracle8i Reference

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