Oracle Backup and Recovery --Rman introduction

1. Introduction:This article is the second in a series of three, introducing Oracle's RMAN (Recovery MANager) backup and recovery tool to novice DBAs. The first article dealt with taking RMAN backups. The aim in the present piece is to cover some recovery scenarios. In all the scenarios it is assumed that:
The database host server is still up and running. Recovery in a situation where the server is unavailable will be the subject of the next article.
The last full backup is available on disk.
All archived logs since the last backup are available on disk. Most of the examples here deal with complete recovery, where all committed transactions up to the point of failure are recovered. We also discuss some cases of incomplete recovery, where the database is recovered to a time prior to failure. Generally one would perform an incomplete recovery only when some of the required logs (archived or online) are missing. One of the examples below deals with just this situation. There are also other valid reasons for performing incomplete recovery - example: to recover a table that has been accidentally dropped. We will not go into these incomplete recovery situations in this article. The following scenarios are discussed:
Recovery from corrupted or missing datafile(s).
Recovery from corrupted or missing online redo logs.
Recovery from corrupted or missing control files. In each of the examples discussed it is assumed that RMAN is invoked on the database host machine using an OS account belonging to the ORA_DBA group. This permits connections to the database without a password, i.e. using "/ as sysdba", as discussed in the first article of this series.2. Instance and database In order to understand some of the recovery procedures below, it is necessary to appreciate the difference between an instance and a database.An instance is made up of Oracle process(es) and associated memory. On Windows operating systems there is a single, multithreaded Oracle process which is associated with a Windows service. The service is normally created when the database is first created, so, as far as this discussion is concerned, the service already exists (for completeness we point out that the service is created and manipulated using the oradim utility - check the Oracle Administrator's Guide for details on oradim). For our purposes then, an Oracle instance refers to the memory associated with the pre-existing Oracle process. The instance is created when a startup command is issued from the command line (SQL Plus or RMAN for example) or via a GUI tool such as Oracle Enterprise Manager. More on this below. A database , on the other hand, refers to the files comprising the database. These files exist independent of any instance. An instance requires that the computer be powered on and also requires that the Oracle service exists. The database, in contrast, exists even if the computer is powered down.An instance can be started up in various modes from SQL Plus or RMAN using the startup command. Three variants of the startup command, relevant to the present discussion are:
startup nomount: The instance is started up - i.e. the required memory structures are associated with the pre-existing Oracle process. At this point the instance is not associated with any database.
startup mount: The instance is started up and the database control file is read. At this point Oracle knows the locations of all files that make up the database. However, the database is not open. It is possible to go from the nomount state to the mount state using the SQL command "alter database mount".
startup: The instance is started up, the control file is read and the database opened for general use. At this point the instance is fully associated with the database. It is possible to go from nomount / mount to the open state using the SQL command "alter database open". There are other options to the startup command which we will not go into here. See the Oracle Administrator's Guide for further details. Note that startup is not a standard SQL command; it can only be executed from an Oracle tool such as SQL Plus or RMAN.