RE: decision to use or not use an rman catalog?

I'd say that's not a very good backup plan. BCV splits are great for offloading the I/O of full backups if your production system can't handle it, and for making test/dev copies of the database, but they don't do you much good if your disk array crashes or your DC is lost. Better to have tapes offsite. We use both BCV copies and rman here - they serve different purposes.

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of ryan_gaffuri_at_comcast.net

before I came here I was on large projects and they used hardware for the backups. They were done with BCV copies and rman was not used.  

how common is that? Is that a better solution than rman? I would think it would get fairly expensive.

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