Oracle9i RMAN Backup & Recovery

As a production DBA this is the best book so far since Velpuri wrote the original Oracle 8i backup and recovery book a decade ago. I like this a lot and together with the Oracle documentation, setting up and using RMAN is a snap compared to the pain it used to be to stumble with RMAN before. Throw away logical backups and hassle of SQL backups and use the power of RMAN. I was able to get cooking in a few hours with a good RMAN setup for our test and production database environments. Together with the Oracle 10g RAC book you have the complete knowledge to be a true HA Oracle DBA.

I was trying to learn Rman from manuals and metalink articles from long time. But I could never learn enough and felt confident from these bits and bytes of info. I was skeptical about this book. But to my surprise, this is one of those rare gems. In two words - very practical.Dump your shell scripts on hot backups and start implementing Rman. I also saw the other book from the same author on oracle 9i new features - an excellent piece.

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.

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.

For anyone who wants to implement RMAN, this is a must-read. This book covers RMAN like Rama Velpuri book covered backup and recovery many years ago. If you're new to RMAN, this covers the 9i aspect of it very well. There is also an appendix entry to cover the differences if you're still stuck in the 8i world. The chapter(19) on case studies(from noarchivelogmode complete loss of everything to duplicating a database even AFTER a resetlogs) is great. It also includes chapters on using RMAN in a RAC environment, using OEM for doing RMAN backups and the various Media Management Tools. Extremely well written.Worth its price and then some.