RMAN, creating recovery catalog

Recovery catalog is oracle's recommendation to use with rman. If you don't use recovery catalog then all database backup/recovery related information will be stored inside the control file of your database. However it is strongly recommended that you use recovery catalog and take regular backups of catalog as well. Here is how you can create recovery catalog. The example assumes that you are creating recovery catalog schema inside your target database.

The process is simple. You will create a tablespace to hold catalog information, a user who will own the recovery catalog and then create the catalog while logging into that schema through rman client.

Here is the process in practice.  


SQL> create tablespace ts_catalog
  2  datafile '/u01/app/oracle/oradata/VSTDB01/catalog.dbf'
  3  size 100M
  4  autoextend on
  5  maxsize 400M;

Tablespace created.

SQL> create user rman identified by rman
  2  default tablespace ts_catalog;

User created.

SQL> grant connect,resource,recovery_catalog_owner to rman;

Grant succeeded.

$ rman catalog rman/rman@VSTDB01

Recovery Manager: Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on Sun Jan 20 13:57:58 2013

Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates.  All rights reserved.

connected to recovery catalog database

RMAN> create catalog tablespace ts_catalog;

recovery catalog created

RMAN> connect target /

connected to target database: VSTDB01 (DBID=2542636510)

RMAN> register database;

database registered in recovery catalog

starting full resync of recovery catalog

full resync complete