RMAN in 10g

Even though there’s a new features guide, there’s always these little things that you discover when you read the manuals.

For example the “duration” option for RMAN backup. It looks very neat, and is actually in RMAN from 10g Release 1.

I gave it a try, to see if it will work and cancel the backup in time. I need this, because our tape backup software has no knowledge of RMAN, so I backup to disk, then the tape backup is scheduled to pick it up and put it to tape.

I wanted to put a time limit on my backup, in case it took longer and overlapped with the tape backup. The database backup is scheduled to start at 1 am, the tape backup is scheduled for 12pm. Usually it takes about 3 hours to run the database backup, so I have plenty of head room. The duration parameter comes really handy, as I can have it cancel the backup in case it does not make it in time for the tape push.

I am all happy that with adding 2 keywords I can add a safety check and and insure not to push to tape incomplete backups, when I discovered the following:

RMAN> backup tag nightly
2> duration 8:00
3> incremental level 1 cumulative
4> database
5> plus archivelog maxsetsize 1200m
6> ;

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of backup plus archivelog command at 06/16/2006 14:54:49
RMAN-03003: command not implemented yet: DURATION with BACKUP PLUS ARCHIVELOG

RMAN>

Command not implemented yet!!!

This is in 10.2 on Linux. The command exists since 10.1 and Oracle did not find the time to implement it with the “plus archivelog” option.

I have this really nice feature (from the previous release) but I can’t use it because I am trying to include the archivelogs (and have good backups)! So in about 5 seconds I went from all happy, to all angry.

Now I have to develop my own check if the backup is completed before the push to tape starts.