Hello Gurus.
11.2.0.4 (on SPARC Solaris 10)
I have a pretty basic Dataguard configuration (one primary, one physical standby) and had a question about RMAN backups (the proximity of my primary/standby is pretty close and is used mainly for local disaster recovery if something goes "bump" in the night!). Most of the material I've read says to take backups of the standby and you are good to go. Well, my database is about 5GB in size and takes less than 45 seconds to backup (level 0 full backup). My thought was to register the Primary and perform nightly RMAN backups. Then it occurred to me that the standby server probably isn't self maintaining and may require a "delete noprompt obsolete", is that correct? I've read some blogs that say "don't do a delete noprompt obsolete, let the FRA handle it"; apparently the FRA cleanses things so that the we don't reach max db_file_recovery_dest_size? I realize that I'll have to do some more reading in this area, I'm just looking for some rules of thumb or opinions.
Also, if I perform a switchover and want to run in that configuration for a day or two, do I make my backup script smart enough to understand who is primary so that it can back up the appropriate 'primary' database?
I don't use OEM in our environment for RMAN, I want a little more control, so I use cron and the cron script runs a KSH script with rman commands. I'd appreciate your inputs, thank you.