RMAN Recovery Manager Facility
Oracle8 introduced the recovery manager RMAN,
which is the Enterprise Backup Utility (EBU) on steroids. RMAN allows backup
of database files at the block level and automatically performs
datafile compression by only backing up blocks that have been used or
altered. In incremental mode, the RMAN only backs up blocks that have
been altered or added in the database, greatly reducing the size of
required backups.
RMAN also allows the following:
* Scripting with RMAN script language, backup,
and restore operations.
* Reports on backup status and backup file
status.
* Use of a recovery catalog to facilitate
backup and restore operations.
* Parallelization of backup and restore
operations.
* Backup based on specified limits (i.e.,
amount of redo generated against a file).
* Backup of database, tablespace, or
individual data files.
* Batch backup operations.
