Chapter 12. RMAN Restore and Recovery

All of your planning and backing up is about to pay off. This chapter is about restoring your backups and then recovering your database. We will first address some basic issues regarding the overall recovery process. Then, we will look at the different methods that you might need to use to restore your RMAN backups to disk and to recover your Oracle database in the event of an outage. We strongly suggest that you test these different types of recoveries on a test database, because you never quite know when you will need to recover your database, and under what conditions.

This chapter is an introduction to foundational restores in RMAN. The number of situational recovery permutations that might exist for a given database is pretty large (we tried to figure it out, but we blew our budget on designing a computer to calculate the answer, and it ended up just giving us plans for a bigger computer to do the job), so it’s important that you understand not only the mechanics of recovery (as we will discuss here), but also how it works in concert with Oracle’s architecture. In this chapter, you will find some rather straightforward recovery situations. In Chapter 15, we will address some of the more advanced recovery techniques. In Chapter 21, we will plow through a number of different recovery case studies. We suggest you read this chapter and test each of the recoveries documented here. Then, look at the more advanced situations in Chapter 15. Once you are really good at recoveries, look at Chapter 21 and try out some of those restores.