RMAN pros and cons

[Former Member]

Hey everyone,

We are implementing a new system, and are struggling to deterimine if it is worth while to implement RMAN. I know Rman can save us backup time and money (as you can perform incremental backups vs. full.. However in the past, I have run into issuse with restores/backups - and was told they were caused by RMAN issues.

Could anyone let me know if this RMAN is now stable, and if it is recommended? If we can handle the extra storage needed to do full online backups daily, is it still worth implementing rman?

Thank you everyone in advance for any info.

Kind Regards

Richard Rog

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Richard,

here is my personal opinion about RMAN.

Pro:

- automatic consistency check of the blocks (if DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM is enabled)

- incremental backups are possible

- brtools support RMAN backups/restores

- block media recovery is only possible with RMAN (but you can use an old fashioned [non-RMAN] backup for this)

Con:

- RMAN requires CPU time while performing the backup

- RMAN compression is not useful if you write your data e.g. to LTO drives which perform compression "for free"

- RMAN is quite complex, so you'll encounter lots of new Oracle error messages

Regards,

Mark