What is RMAN ( Part - 1 )

Recovery Catalog

The recovery catalog is an optional repository of information about your target databases that RMAN uses and maintains.

Physical location of the catalog

We should place the catalog database on a different server than the target database. If we fail to do this, we jeopardize backup and recovery options, because we make it possible to lose both the catalog and the target database.

The catalog database should be created with the latest version of Oracle in your production environment. This helps to minimize compatibility issues and complexity when you start to back up your target databases.


Creating a catalog

The examples in this section provide details for creating a catalog database and registering a target database within the catalog. These examples assume that your catalog database is on a different host than your target database.


Catalog database: Oracle 9.2.0.4 (ORCL1) on server1

Target database: Oracle 10.1.0.2 (NITI1) on Server2


To create a recovery catalog follow these steps

1. Create a specific tablespace to hold the catalog objects.

2. Create a catalog schema.

3. Issue appropriate grants

4. Create the schema objects.

Oracle@Server2:~> sqlplus system/manager@ORCL1

CREATE TABLESPACE rman_cat
DATAFILE ‘/U01/oracle/db/ORCL1/CAT/rman_cat_01.dbf’
SIZE 50M;


Now that we have a tablespace to store our schema objects, we can create the schema

CREATE USER rmancat
IDENTIFIED BY rmancat
DEFAULT TABLESPACE rman_cat
TEMPORARY TABLESPACE temp
QUOTA UNLIMITED ON rman_cat;


Before we create the catalog objects, we need to grant special privileges to new schema. These privileges, granted through the RECOVRY_CATALOG_OWNER role, let the schema manage its catalog objects.

GRANT RECOVERY_CATALOG_OWNER TO rmancat;
GRANT CREATE TYPE TO rmancat;


We can now create the catalog objects within our new schema. In order to perform this step, invoke RMAN, connect to newly created catalog schema, and issue the create catalog command. If we don't specify a tablespace with the create catalog command, the catalog objects are created in the default tablespace assigned to the catalog owner.


Oracle@Server2:~> rman catalog rmancat/rmancat@ORCL1

Recovery Manager: Release 10.1.0.2.0 - Production
Copyright (c) 1995,2004, Oracle. All rights reserved.
connected to recovery catalog database
recovery catalog is not installed

RMAN> create catalog;
Recovery catalog created

RMAN> exit;

At this point, we now have an operational RMAN catalog