The restore operation may take place under several conditions, such as the accidental loss of datafiles, media failure or a complete host failure, just to name a few cases. The scenario may end up in a loss of a critical or non-critical datafiles, a loss of the redo log (current or inactive), or a combination of such scenarios. You must always be prepared to face whatever critical situation comes up.

There are some pieces of advice you should keep in mind; practice the use of recovery manager, and get familiar with the syntax. Even if you have an application built on top of rman to perform the backup or recover operations you must know the nuts and bolts that make it work. Build a database that represents your production environment and practice different recovery scenarios on it, this will keep your recovery skills sharp and ready to be used any time.

Most botched recoveries can be attributed to human error. Make sure your backups are valid and usable. Consider including a test backup...