When the production data, the most company's valuable asset, is involved—checking the status of the backup procedures, verifying those will take back our database safe and sound, measuring both, time it takes and space it requires are some of the common tasks a DBA must perform.

Thinking today of the old, de facto deprecated, User Managed Backup concept is equivalent to taking our database back to the 7.3 prehistoric ages. Since Recovery Manager first appeared as a new feature back in 8.0, it has never stopped evolving. Release after release, Oracle has continuously developed new features, improving it and making it more user friendly. Starting with Oracle 9i, RMAN has introduced a set of new features that has turned this tool into the default choice to perform backup and recovery strategies. Oracle is always improving this tool and making it more efficient. Both in 10g and 11g there are several features oriented to make the backup and recovery session more productive, and more manageable...