A few months ago, I have come across of an interesting circumstances while doing an RMAN point-in-time-recovery (PITR) on one of our business critical RAC databases. I thought it would be worthy to blog about the interesting scenario that I come across. Ok, I need to take my memories back in time to explain what had happen.
At that time, I was advised to rollback the database using the last night ONLINE RMAN backup and recovery (forward) it to a particular point in time. I was able to restore the database successfully using the last night backup. However, while doing the recovery, RMAN was requesting archived logs that were generated almost a week back. I was surprised a little bit about this behavior as I was in a impression that RMAN looks for the archived logs that were generated after the online backup. Though I have restore and recover the database successfully to a PIT, I thought of conducting a mini quiz on this behavior to get cross your perspective on this, before I reveal the secrets and blog about it. So, here goes your quiz:
Under which circumstances does an RMAN recovery needs archive logs generated before the backup sets that are used in the restore operation?
Best of luck and awaits for your response....
Jaffar
