New Features in Oracle Database 10g Release 2

RMAN continues to improve in Oracle Database 10g Release 2, with the addition of the following features:

• New views. These views correlate and simplify the metadata of an RMAN backup job. This enhances the manageability of RMAN backups by providing a SQL interface to this data rather than relying on RMAN reports and commands. For example, V$BACKUP_ARCHIVELOG_DETAILS and V$BACKUP_ARCHIVELOG_SUMMARY provide details such as the name, compression ratio, and other details of archive logs in a backup set or proxy copy. Similar views display details for control file, system parameter (SPFILE), data file, and backup sets.

• Temporary data files (TEMPFILE) re-creation. TEMPFILEs that are part of the locally managed TEMPORARY tablespace are now recreated during recovery. Such TEMPFILE recreation, when forgotten during database cloning, used to result in errors when the process required space in the TEMPORARY tablespace.

• OEM for RMAN. OEM has been modified to use the built-in RMAN compression feature when used to clone databases, saving on both disk space and network usage at the expense of some CPU cycles for compression/decompression.

• Dynamic channel allocation in RAC environments. By configuring parallelism when backing up or recovering a RAC database, RMAN channels are dynamically allocated across all RAC instances. This is similar to dynamic RMAN channel allocation for a single instance. Channel failover allows a failed operation on one node to be continued on another node. This feature eliminates manual allocation of RMAN channels for each RAC node and provides better tolerace of media failures. In other words, when one node fails, another node can continue the backups.