As an Oracle DBA, your job involves risk management. By using Oracle Recovery Manager, you can minimize some of the risk involved in the management of your database backup. Recovery Manager will use your Oracle server to manage your recovery catalog. This architecture eliminates some of the most common errors DBAs encounter with the management of their backup sets, such as backing up to the wrong location, incorrectly naming your backup sets, and forgetting to back up enough.

RMAN works by creating Oracle server processes that connect to your target database. These server processes will perform backup, restoration, and recovery activities. RMAN will also create processes to manage reading and writing to tape through a Media Management Layer.
RMAN can run as a command-line process or through the GUI as Backup Manager in the Oracle Enterprise Manager suite. You have complete flexibility to run RMAN interactively or in a batch mode. If you choose to use a recovery catalog, which is discussed later in this course, information about your backups will be stored in both the control file and the RMAN recovery database.

RMAN has several useful features:

1. RMAN supports all types of physical backups and provides the flexibility to manage the backup of your Oracle databases, tablespaces, data files, control files, and archive log files.
2. RMAN provides backup and recovery information storage if you use the recovery catalog.
3. RMAN provides script storage for frequently executed operations.
4. RMAN detects block corruption.
5. RMAN provides easy manageability of distributed database backups in Oracle Parallel Server environments.

In the next lesson, you will review the major components of Recovery Manager.