Oracle Database Discussions

I am an Oracle newbie and have some issues regarding backups and the flash recovery area that I would really like some help with.

One of our departments recently had a new Oracle 10g server installed. We are responsible for the hardware and OS (W2K3) however a third party are responsible for the installation of Oracle as it interacts with their reporting system and medical hardware. Despite their installation and config they stipulate that they are not responsible for any internal 'logical' backup and hence left the Oracle DB in 'NoArchiveLog' mode.

As part of our global backup policy We backup the entire contents of the server but I thought that it would be better to have more recovery options on the server itself.
After reading various docs from Oracle and only using EM, I placed the database in ARCHIVELOG mode. The Oracle databases in total are ~9GB and as we have plenty of hard disk space I set the Flash Recovery Area Size to 25GB. The ‘Enable flashback logging for fast database point-in-time recovery’ option was enabled with the retention time set at 24 hours.
I then set backup settings and policies in EM as follows:
- Automatically backup the control file and server parameter file (SPFILE) with every backup and database structural change
- Optimize the whole database backup by skipping unchanged files such as read-only and offline datafiles that have been backed up
I then set 'Retain backups that are necessary for a recovery to any time within the specified number of days (point-in-time recovery)’ and accepted the default of 31 days.
I then chose Choose ‘Oracle-suggested’ for the Backup Strategy. Basically a full backup was taken in September at the first backup with incrementals thereafter. The backups on disk will be retained so that a full db recovery or point in time recovery to any time within the past 1 day can occur.

This I assumed would mean that the flash recovery area would be self managing and that any old backups/logs (older than 31 days) would be deleted and the free space reclaimed. It would also contain backups sufficient for the past 31 days.

Last week the database failed because the Flash Recovery Area Size reached it's 25GB limit! I was unsure of exactly what to do, so have simply increased the Flash recovery area size as a short term measure until the issue is resolved correctly.


My questions are:


- Is the Flash Recovery Area self managing and have I set it up incorrectly? Should it be growing continuously? How do I stop it? I would like for it to be the correct size and for minimal admin intervention. I am not sure how to set the correct size of the Flash area.

- Does my backup strategy provide any benefit? I have basically set everything up with default values in the hope that it would give more resiliance.

- The database shows in EM as being backed up on 20th Septemeber. Is this correct based upon my settings above?

Hope that the questions make sense but I have limited knowledge of Oracle and have only used EM as the front end interface.