The Oracle Recovery Manager is a DBA tool comprising several required and optional components.
In this lesson, we will identify these components and provide a brief overview of their role in RMAN.
Later lessons will address the interactions between these components in greater detail.
Components used with Oracle Recovery Manager
Five components interact in the process of using Oracle Recovery Manager. The table below describes each component.
Oracle Recovery Manager component
Description
RMAN executable engine
The RMAN engine translates Recovery Manager commands into a sequence of steps that will be performed.
RMAN interface
The RMAN interface is similar to the SVRMGR interface that we used in earlier modules of the Oracle Backup and Recovery Workshop.
The RMAN interface allows you to enter both interactive and batch commands to be processed by the RMAN engine.
Production database
This is the database that you want to back up, restore, or recover.
Recovery catalog(s)
This is an optional database that is used to store information about your production database and the RMAN activities performed on the production database.
These processes, called channels in some documentation, are created by RMAN to communicate with various components in your environment. Two processes connect to your production database.
Processes communicate with your target media, either disk or tape.
You have the freedom to select the media that you will back up to. There are also optional processes that are generated to talk to your recovery catalog(s).
The following MouseOver further illustrates the various RMAN components:
Production Database: This is the database that you will backup.
Server Process: This server process will write data to disk for RMAN.
Server Process: This server process will talk to the Media Management Layer to write data to tape.
Server Process: This is the default server process which connects to the production database.
Server Process: This server process will connect to the recovery catalog database.
Recovery Catalog Database: This database maintains information about a Recovery Manager backups.
Disk: This is the disk that will hold the backed up data.
Media Management Layer: This is the software that will manage writing to the tape subsystems.
Tape: This will hold the backup data.
Server Process: This server process connects to the production database- the polling process.