Incrementally updated backups

Imagine that you are a DBA working for a large company and managing a very large sized database, for example, a database of 100 TB. Now, there would be two major challenges that you would need to face. One would be how to bring down the time required for the backup of such a large sized database, and the second would be in the event of a recovery, how to ensure that the time required to get it done would be as short as possible. Before you can start recovering the file, you would need to restore it and that's where the most time is spent. So how can we reduce the restore time for a datafile which is possibly multi-gigabytes?

Most likely, for the first requirement, you may have already guessed the answer – incremental backups are the only way to go. But what about the second requirement, to reduce the elapsed time for restore and recovery processes? The answer comes from the feature – incrementally updated backups. Using this method, RMAN rolls forward the backup...