Chapter 6. Configuring and Recovering with RMAN

This chapter is probably going to be amongst the most ponderous chapters of the book—one that you will want to keep returning to. Any tool is only good if it has the ability to be optimized depending on the requirements of its user and the ability to perform the most important tasks that it's meant for. The same goes for RMAN as well; it can not only be customized to a great extent, but also has the ability to recover your database from a variety of crashes. In this chapter, we shall look at these two abilities of RMAN, that is, how to configure it and how to use it for database recovery. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? So let us get started, shall we?

In the chapter, we will be discussing the following topics:

• Listing the various configuration settings of RMAN

• Altering RMAN configurations using the CONFIGURE command

• Understanding the mechanics of database recovery

• Performing recoveries using RMAN