Yesterday I was discussing with a fellow DBA about ways to check
the status of existing and/or past RMAN jobs. Good backup scripts
usually write their output to some sort of log file so, checking
the output is usually a straight-forward task. However, backup
jobs can be scheduled in many different ways (crontab, Grid
Control, Scheduled Tasks, etc) and finding the log file may be
tricky if you don’t know the environment well.
Furthermore, log files may also have already been overwritten by
the next backup or simply just deleted. An alternative way of
accessing that information, thus, may come handy.
Fortunately, RMAN keeps the backup metadata around for some time and it can be accessed through the database’s V$ views. Obviously, if you need this information because your database just crashed and needs to be restored, the method described here is useless.
Backup jobs’ status and metadata
A lot of metadata about …
[Read more]