I just heard some fourth hand information that RMAN has been enhanced in a version post 8.0.6 that will allow for additional compression of the output file. I searched your archives, found a similar thread from last year. I, too, tried the compression via pipe inside RMAN, which, of course did not work.

Is there an enhancement to RMAN in a newer version of Oracle that would reduce the size of our db output file to smaller than the size of the actual data?

Thanks in advance,
DJ