The acronym RMAN stands for Oracle's Recovery Manager, with an emphasis on the word Recovery. Backups are worthless if you can't use them to restore lost data! RMAN is Oracle's recommended standard for database backups for any sized organization. There are other storage-based technologies that are also available for database backup—each one is vendor-specific. If your environment is still using the old-fashioned hot or cold backups (also known as user-managed), it is time to come out of the dinosaur age. The RMAN utility is easy to automate by scripting with the command-line version, which the provided example code for this chapter utilizes.
RMAN is used for many different tasks as part of the DBA to-do list presented back in Chapter 1 of this book. That importance deserves its own section in the book. This chapter will touch only briefly on some of the basics, with the understanding that you have gained some knowledge from previous chapters in this book, have read...