Introduction

When You are or will be working with Rman  as your backup solution you will have to ask yourself several questions . One of the elementary ones will be that you have to consider whether or not you will be utilizing an Rman Catalog or that  you will have faith in the existing  multiplexed controlfiles.  On the web I see debates going on about the use of a catalog and indeed given the idea that you will not need a catalog , since you are not be using stored scripts, you might get timeouts simply cause working with catalog shows long time no communication ( and you have those hmm lets say aggressive  firewalls in place that will snap at that so-it-seems idle sessions) etc. Well this post is about what you should do if you decide to have a catalog  for rman after all or if a catalog is in place due to company hmm  history – habits – or standards.

What  you should consider to have in place ( of course always  depends on your settings and configuration) Should be  a maintenance job for your Rman Catalog for the specific Database ( target)  you have added there.  With some explain below I would like to show you what was done for that maintenance part  by showing scripts we used for that.

Details:

#!/bin/ksh
#set -vx
PROG=$(basename $0)

if [ -z “$1” ]; then
echo “ERROR – wrong start commando”
echo “EXAMPLE – $PROG <SID>”
exit 1
fi

## Script will take the Instance that has been registered as an input parameter
export ORACLE_SID=$1

## Finding the ORATAB since it will help to set Oracle Home
if [ “${OS}” = “Linux” ];then
export ORATAB=/var/opt/oracle/oratab
else
export ORATAB=/etc/oratab
fi
ORATABLINE=`grep $ORACLE_SID $ORATAB`
export ORACLE_HOME=`echo $ORATABLINE | cut -f2 -d:`

## exporting several Parameters among which logging path and logfilename with a timestamp in it
export LOGPATH=/opt/oracle/scripts/log
export CURRENT_TIMESTAMP=`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`   # Format: YYYYMMDD_HHMISS   e.g.: 20110907_150455
export LOGFILE=${ORACLE_SID}_crosscheck_${CURRENT_TIMESTAMP}.log
export NLS_DATE_FORMAT=”DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS”
export ORA_NLS32=${ORACLE_HOME}/ocommon/nls/admin/data
export ORA_NLS33=${ORACLE_HOME}/ocommon/nls/admin/data
export NLS_LANG=American_America.WE8ISO8859P15

## Connect to rman and your catalog  and start logging (msglog)  to the specified logdir and logfile.
## then allocate a channel. Note if you make backups to TAPE as we do you HAVE to allocate a channel for maintenance type SBT_TAPE and you HAVE to mention in our case specific Networker Server and Networker Client.
## then you perform the crosscheck backup which will check in the Networker database if the Backups is still available. If it is not the backup will be tagged expired in the Rman catalog.
## Once the  crosscheck is finished we wanted to see a result so did a list backup.
## If you are sure that what you see is correct  delete noprompt expired will erase the no longer existing backups in rman.. MAYBE best to run script first without this. Always best to be safe then sorry.
## After delete another Listing is performed as a record of the post  delete information in the catalog.

${ORACLE_HOME}/bin/rman TARGET  / RCVCAT rman_${ORACLE_SID}/${ORACLE_SID}@RMAN MSGLOG ${LOGPATH}\/${LOGFILE} << EOF
allocate channel for maintenance device type ‘SBT_TAPE’;
send ‘NSR_ENV=(NSR_SERVER=adebckus-nl,NSR_CLIENT=adesnouh)’;
crosscheck backup;
list backup of database summary;
delete noprompt expired backup;
list backup of database summary;
release channel;
exit
EOF

Happy Reading and best  of Luck,

Mathijs