Components of Recovery Manager

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.

Here is an upgraded overview of RMAN (Recovery Manager) in Oracle 23ai, reflecting its modern capabilities and architecture:
🔧 Ease of Use Enhancements

• Simplified Command Syntax: RMAN commands now include enhanced defaults and intelligent context-based execution (e.g., fewer CONFIGURE statements needed for common tasks).
• Integrated OCI Support: RMAN seamlessly integrates with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage using native configurations (no manual media manager setup).
• Auto-Healing and Advice: RMAN provides AI-based recovery recommendations when it detects incomplete backups, orphaned blocks, or fragmented data sets.

📀 Enhanced Tape and Cloud Backup Support

• Cloud-Native Backups: Direct support for OCI Object Storage and Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance (ZDLRA).
• Multi-Destination Backup: Easily configure backups to both on-prem tape libraries and cloud simultaneously, with failover awareness.
• Support for SBT-compatible cloud libraries: New RMAN enhancements make using 3rd-party SBT (System Backup to Tape) libraries easier and more secure.

🔒 Improved Security

• End-to-End Encryption:
  • RMAN backups are encrypted by default if TDE is enabled.
  • Supports KMIP-based key stores and OCI Vault integration.
• Backup Access Control:
  • Backups can now be tied to IAM policies, enabling Oracle Cloud tenancy-based access and audit control.
• Immutable Backups:
  • RMAN backups can be flagged as immutable in object storage to prevent tampering (useful for ransomware recovery plans).

🚀 Performance and High Availability Optimizations
Block Change Tracking 2.0:

• Improved tracking speeds up incremental backups and reduces CPU overhead during backup cycles.
• Parallelism and Multi-Channel Tuning:
  • Enhanced multi-channel support for cloud and tape backups ensures balanced bandwidth usage.
• Real-Time Logging Integration:
  • RMAN can now archive and backup redo in near real-time, lowering RTO (Recovery Time Objective) for critical apps.

• Platform-Aware Backups:
  • RMAN identifies source and target platform compatibility (e.g., endian format) and handles conversion on the fly.
• Backup-Based Data Pump Transport:
  • Combine RMAN image copies with Data Pump metadata for easier cloud migrations and Data Guard setups.

✅ RMAN Invocation in Oracle 23ai
Just as before, invoke RMAN at the command line:

$ rman

You can also launch it with a specific connection:

$ rman target sys@prod auxiliary sys@standby

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 diagram further illustrates the various RMAN components:

Here's a breakdown:
✅ What Still Holds True in Oracle 23ai

Statement	Status	Notes
Oracle Secure Backup (OSB) supplies an SBT interface for RMAN to back up to tape	✅	Still valid. OSB remains Oracle's officially supported media management layer for System Backup to Tape (SBT).
Only OSB supports RMAN encrypted backups and unused block compression directly to tape	✅	This is still exclusive to OSB; other third-party media managers may support encryption or compression but not with the same tight RMAN-level integration.
Backup of committed undo is excluded when using OSB	✅	This is still an OSB-exclusive optimization, particularly beneficial for large databases with active undo.
Shared buffer architecture reduces CPU overhead in 11g and beyond	✅	The buffer-sharing design continues in Oracle 23ai, ensuring reduced memory and CPU use when streaming to tape.
OSB has tighter integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM)	✅	In Oracle 23ai, OSB continues to provide the most comprehensive OEM integration, including centralized tape management, job scheduling, and reporting.

🟡 What's Evolved or Expanded in Oracle 23ai

Feature	Description
Cloud-first options	In Oracle 23ai, Oracle heavily emphasizes OCI Object Storage and Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance (ZDLRA). Tape is still supported, but many customers are moving toward cloud-based immutable backups.
Media Management Abstraction via Oracle Recovery Service	OSB is still relevant for tape, but Oracle Recovery Service abstracts some backup operations (especially for Autonomous DB) without requiring direct tape configuration.
Enterprise Manager 23c/23ai Enhancements	OEM has better dashboards for backup compliance, SLA tracking, and integration with OCI Vault when OSB is used.
KMIP & Vault Integration	Encryption key handling for OSB backups is better integrated with Oracle Key Vault or OCI Vault, ensuring compliance with modern cloud security standards.

❗ Important Consideration
While third-party SBT libraries (e.g., from IBM, Veritas, or Dell EMC) may claim compatibility, only OSB guarantees full feature parity with RMAN, especially for:

• Block change tracking optimizations
• Encrypted or compressed tape streams
• Integrated policy-driven backup using OEM

✅ Conclusion:
Yes, your statement still holds true for Oracle 23ai with the understanding that:

• Tape remains a valid but legacy-leaning option.
• Cloud storage is now preferred for most environments.
• OSB is still the gold standard for RMAN-to-tape operations and Enterprise Manager integration.

Oracle Secure Backup supplies reliable data protection through file system backup to tape. The Oracle Secure Backup SBT interface enables you to use Recovery Manager (RMAN) to back up Oracle databases. All major tape drives and tape libraries in SAN, Gigabit Ethernet, and SCSI environments are supported.

• Oracle Secure Backup Features
  Oracle Secure Backup enables you to do the following:
  1. Centrally manage tape backup and restore operations of distributed, mixed-platform environments (see Oracle Secure Backup Installation Guide for supported machine architectures). You can access local and remote file systems and devices from any location in a network without using NFS or CIFS.
  2. Back up to and restore data from Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS) on Linux and Windows.
  3. Use wildcards and exclusion lists to specify what you want to back up.
  4. Perform multilevel incremental backups.
  5. Duplex database backups so that the same data stream goes to multiple devices. You can specify different media families or devices for each copy of the data.
  6. Create backups that span multiple volumes.
  7. Optimize tape resources with automatic drive sharing.
  8. Restore data rapidly. Oracle Secure Backup uses direct-to-block positioning and direct access restore to avoid unnecessarily reading tape blocks to locate files. Oracle Secure Backup maintains a record of the tape position of all backup data in its catalog for rapid retrieval.
  9. Maintain security and limit the users who are authorized to perform data management operations. By default, SSL is used for authentication and communication between hosts in the administrative domain.

In the next lesson, you will learn about some of the choices you need to make before using RMAN.