Oracle9i RMAN Backup & Recovery

Rating:
Summary: You RMAD if you love RMAN
Review: RMAN is proof positive that Oracle corporation doesn't give a rat's ass about making their products easier to manage. RMAN thing is hard to love and even harder to learn. No wonder most Oracle DBA are not proficient with RMAN, at least not enough to troubleshoot it when the basic "backup database" and "restore database" statements go awry. The stinker is that RMAN isn't that much more sophisticated than SQL Backups. For example, the online tablespace restore is not really a feature, but really a bug. It is so convoluted it is a miracle when someone can pull it off. One advantage RMAN has is its ability to restore OFFLINE tablespaces while the rest of the database is online. But SQL backup/restore is about 10x easier.

This book, unfortunately, is a must for the Oracle DBAs. Do not believe you know RMAN unless you read this book. Actually, do not believe you know RMAN unless you RMAD.

There are 12 disaster case scenarios and their solutions in the book, which are quite helpful. Plus, there are around 12 workouts which explains the basic intricacies of RMAND commands.



Rating:
Summary: Great book for learning Oracle RMAN
Review: This book is an invaluable supplement to the Oracle RMAN documentation. It serves two audiences well: if you are just beginning to learn RMAN, or if you need to configure RMAN with a media management tool like Veritas, Legato, etc. Robert includes some great diagrams that really clarify what occurs during different RMAN operations. For the beginner, Robert includes many tips for things that aren't covered well in the Oracle documentation that can really trip up a beginner. I sure wish this book had been published earlier when I was struggling to learn RMAN from just the Oracle documentation. If you are beyond the basics, there is plenty of advanced material to configure RMAN at a large enterprise. If you are still running Oracle8i, Robert describes how to adapt the material back to Oracle8i.

Rating:
Summary: An Outstanding Book
Review: This book is one of the most usefull Oracle book I had opportunity to read (for the past 11 years, since I started working with Oracle 5, I collected over seventy Oracle books - more or less everything usefull published on the subject). It offers in-depth overview of Oracle architecture, RMAN utility, configuration of various third party tools and number of real-life case studies with detail step-by-step explanations (these case studies resembles 'labs' in super-expensive Oracle courses). It is usefull book for every level and deffinitely one of the best-written Oracle books on the market.