Backup and Recovery Reference is intended for database administrators who perform the following tasks:

• Use Recovery Manager (RMAN) to back up, restore, and recover Oracle databases

• Perform maintenance on RMAN backups of database files

To use this document, you must know the following:

• Relational database concepts and basic database administration as described in Oracle Database Concepts and the Oracle Database Administrator's Guide

• RMAN concepts and tasks as described in Oracle Database Backup and Recovery User's Guide

• The operating system environment under which you run Oracle Database

For more information, see these Oracle resources:

• Oracle Database Backup and Recovery User's Guide

• Oracle Database Reference

• Oracle Database Utilities

Many of the examples in this book use the sample schemas of the seed database, which is installed by default when you install Oracle. Refer to Oracle Database Sample Schemas for information on how these schemas were created and how you can use them yourself.

The text in this reference adheres to the following conventions:

• UPPERCASE monospace

  RMAN keywords, SQL keywords, column headings in tables and views, and initialization parameters.

• lowercase monospace

  Variable text in RMAN examples.

• italics

  RMAN or SQL placeholders, that is, text that should not be entered as is, but represents a value to be entered by the user.