Reasons not to user RMAN

[antilles]

I am setting up Hotbackups for an ERP system. We are using Vertias which utilizes a pretty extensive cataloging system. We are debating not using Rman and using manual scripts to set tablespaces in backup mode,(Veritas has nice functionality to handle this). I personally like it better than using RMAN scripts. But, I could easily be overlooking something that RMAN provides that I might not be getting from Veritas. Any opinions on RMAN would be helpful. thanks

[marist89]

The beauty of RMAN, IMHO, is that it is transparent to the media manager. For example, if you decided to switch to Legato or Brightstor, it would make absolutely no difference to RMAN.

Another reason I like RMAN over home-grown scripting is that RMAN uses the same interface for all backups. You teach your DBAs how to use RMAN, they know how to do backups & recoveries regardless of where the backup is stored and what software put it there.

Lastly, RMAN allows you to minimize the manual steps in your recovery. For example, you don't have to know that /u01/oradata/mysid/foo_data01.dbf needs to be restored; rman does that for you automatically. In 9i, a recovery is as easy as saying "RECOVER DATABASE".

[kgb]

(Oracle Applications 11i) ERP takes around 20Gb - that is a good reason.
There are several tables which are very transactional, it is better to NOLOGING option for them, our database makes around 50000 transaction per night with that tables when nobody use it.

[clio_usa]

Here are some more benefits of RMAN:

1. With RMAN incremental backup you can backup only the blocks changed since the last backup, which might be a big time saver for VLDB.

2. Also RMAN doesn't backup empty blocks in the datafiles, which will save you tapes and restore files speed.

3. As of 9i it became solid rock and easy to use. Just two commands are need it to back the database.

4. You can parallelize the the backups if you have multiple tape library drives, which saves time on both backup and restore process time.


Hope that helps,

clio_usa

OCP 8/8i/9i DBA
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[SANJAY_G]

And also.. you can store the scripts for different types of backup and recovery scenarios.

Sanjay