Online RMAN incremental backups...

Question

Oracle10g RHEL4 AS
HI All,
I wanted to know what options can use to do an online incremental backup without using so much space. Currently, our flash recovery area is only 8G and when I ran an incremental backup it got filled after backing up only 3 datafiles. The command that I used was as follows:
run {
sql 'alter system switch logfile';
allocate channel t1 DEVICE type DISK;
RECOVER COPY OF DATABASE WITH TAG 'incr_update';
BACKUP INCREMENTAL LEVEL 1 FOR RECOVER OF COPY WITH TAG 'incr_update'
DATABASE;
sql 'alter system archive log current';
release channel t1;
Is there any option that I can use to compress or make smaller these incremental backups? Or is this perhaps happening because this is the first backup and it is making a Level 0 backup first and then future backups will be Level 1? Either way I would like to know how I can shrink the backups that are being generated.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Is there any option that I can use to compress or make smaller these incremental backups? You could try the backup set compression.
Or is this perhaps happening because this is the first backup and it is making a Level 0 backup first and then future backups will be Level 1?Yes this is likely.
You may also reduce used space in the FRA if you decrease your recovery retention policy (depending of course of your restore/recovery requirements).