Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference Author: Darl Kubn & Scott Schulze Pages: 111 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates ISBN: 0-596-00233-5 Summary: A concise, useful reference to Oracle's RMAN backup and recovery utility. Review Date: 24 Mar, 2003

Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference

Oracle's Recovery Manager can be a powerful tool to ease the process of making regular database backups, but its complexity can also make it quite overwhelming for the fledgling database administrator. O'Reilly's RMAN Pocket Reference brings together some important points, and a useful reference to the array of commands available from RMAN.

The book is split into two major portions. The first portion discusses the basics of RMAN architecture, the pieces that you use to build your backup and recovery strategy. Continuing, this is followed by dicsussion on starting RMAN, various ways of executing RMAN commands, creating a recovery catalog database instance, and storing RMAN scripts. Finishing up the first portion is basic coverage of performing backups and recovery procedures with RMAN.

The second half of the book is a reference to all the RMAN commands available in both Oracle8i and Oracle9i. Of course with the size constraints, the authors can't go into too much detail for each command, but the full syntax for each command is given, and simple examples are provided for the most commonly-used commands.

As it is a pocket reference, don't expect any real in-depth discussion of the topics and commands presented, but the authors do a good job in trying to "cover topics that you are most likely to encounter while using RMAN". If you haven't participated in Oracle's Backup and Recovery class, or haven't read much about these topics, you're not likely to get too much from this book. I found for myself (having attended the class), the book was a good high-level overview and refresher of the basic topics, and very helpful in organizing (and understanding) my own backup processes (which were initially written by another DBA). The command reference will be very useful for anyone writing RMAN scripts.

In short, if you're interested in using RMAN to manage your Oracle backup and recovery procedures and unless you enjoy wading through the reams of Oracle's documentation, you'll probably want to get yourself a copy of the Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference.

Overall rating: 9/10