Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference

Target Prerequisites

If you already have your target database environment set up, you can skip this section. If not, there are a few things you need to have in place before instructing RMAN to connect to the target:

• Appropriate target environment variables must be established.

• You must have access to an O/S account or a schema that has SYSDBA privileges.

Before you connect to your target database, you must ensure that the standard Unix environment variables are established. These variables include: ORACLE_SID, ORACLE_HOME, PATH, NLS_LANG, and NLS_DATE_FORMAT. They govern the name of the instance, the path to the RMAN executable; and the behavior of backup, restore, and reporting commands.

Note

When using RMAN, NLS_LANG should be set to the character set that your database was created with. If you do not set NLS_LANG, you may encounter problems when issuing BACKUP, RESTORE, and RECOVER commands.

Once you have the appropriate environment variables set, you then need access to an O/S account or a database schema that has SYSDBA privileges. You must have access to the SYSDBA privilege before you can connect to the target database using RMAN. There are two methods of administering the SYSDBA privilege:

• Locally via O/S authentication

• Remotely via password file

O/S authentication is established when you install the Oracle binaries. At that time, you set up a Unix group, often named dba, and specify this as the O/S group with SYSDBA privileges. Often the Unix account used to install the Oracle ...