Backup And Recovery Solutions; Setting Environment Variables - Novell ZENWORKS LINUX MANAGEMENT 7.2 IR2 - ADMINISTRATION GUIDE 09-25-2008 Administration Manual

Section 9.3.6, "Recovering the Database," on page 92
Section 9.3.7, "Shutting Down the Database," on page 94

9.3.1 Backup and Recovery Solutions

Oracle provides two methods of backup and recovery:
Recovery Manager (RMAN)
User-managed backup and recovery.
The RMAN utility is automatically installed with the database. It can back up an Oracle8 database
and all later versions of an Oracle* database. RMAN uses server sessions on the database to perform
backup and recovery. RMAN has its own syntax and is accessible either through a command-line
interface or through the Oracle Enterprise Manager GUI. RMAN also provide APIs to interface with
third-party media managers.
The advantage of RMAN is that it obtains and stores metadata about its operations in the control file
of the database. An independent recovery catalog can be set up, which is a schema that contains
metadata imported from the control file, in a separate recovery catalog database. RMAN performs
the necessary record keeping for backups, archived logs, and so forth using the metadata, so
restoration and recovery is greatly simplified.
An alternative method of performing recovery is to use operating system commands for backups and
SQL*Plus for recovery. This method is called User-managed backup and recovery.
RMAN automates backup and recovery, but the User-managed method requires keeping track of all
database files and backups. Therefore, because of its robustness and simplified database
administration abilities, RMAN is a highly recommended tool for backup operations. The
subsequent sections of this document explain the steps for using RMAN to perform a complete
database backup and recovery.

9.3.2 Setting Environment Variables

1 Set the following environment variables to the appropriate values before using RMAN:
ORACLE_HOME: The directory where the Oracle software is installed. For example:
ORACLE_HOME=/home/oracle/product/9ir2
CLASSPATH: The paths to the libraries installed by Oracle. For example:
CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:/oracle/opt/oracle/product/9ir2/JRE:/
oracle/opt/oracle/product/9ir2/jlib:/oracle/opt/oracle/
product/9ir2/rdbms/jlib:/oracle/opt/oracle/product/9ir2/
network/jlib
PATH: The Oracle installation's bin directory. For example:
PATH=$PATH:/home/oracle/product/9ir2/bin
90 Novell ZENworks 7.2 Linux Management Administration Guide