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Retention policy vs. Archivelog deletion policy

garywickeMay 21 2012 — edited Sep 21 2012
Environment:

Oracle EE 11.2.0.3 on Solaris 10.5

Which policy takes precedence?

My Retention Policy is set to 'Recovery window of 8 days' and my Archivelog deletion policy is set to 'backed up 2 times to disk'.

My DAILY full backup happens at 03:00am and uses the following commands:
backup incremental level 0 cumulative database tag 'full_daily' plus archivelog tag 'full_daily';
DELETE NOPROMPT OBSOLETE;
I also have an archivelog backup that runs every 4 hours at 02:00, 06:00, 10:00, 14:00, 18:00 and 22:00 and looks like this:
backup archivelog all tag '&1';
delete noprompt ARCHIVELOG UNTIL TIME 'SYSDATE-8';
With the archivelog backup running every 4 hours the logs are getting backed up to disk the required 2 times very quickly. Much sooner than 8 days! :-)

I have a problem where the archivelog backup that runs immediately AFTER the full database backup fails due to not being able to find some older archivelog files.

In looking at V$ARCHIVED_LOG the files were dated (COMPLETION_DATE) just outside the 8 day retention window but they had a status of 'A' (Archived) instead of the 'D' (Deleted) I was expecting. When I ran a 'Crosscheck archivelog all' it changed the statuses to 'D' and the next archivelog backup ran successfully.

What am I missing?

Should I change the archivelog deletion policy to something else? If so, what and why (just trying to understand!) ?

I am not using an FRA and have controlfile autobackup turned on.

Please let me know if you need more information. I have been scouring the docs and the 11g RMAN Oracle Press book but haven't found the trick yet!

Thanks for any assistance!

-gary
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Locked on Oct 19 2012
Added on May 21 2012
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