Problem with time based rman recovery

Question

Hi and happy boxing day:
I am following by the letter the instructions in Sybex FundamentalsII book p.348 regarding an rman time based recovery. Here is the syntax:
RMAN> run {
2> allocate channel ch1 type disk;
3> set until time 'DEC 26 2007 10:30:00';
4> restore database;
5> recover database;
6> sql 'alter database open resetlogs';
7> }
and here is the error:
allocated channel: ch1
channel ch1: sid=11 devtype=DISK
executing command: SET until clause
released channel: ch1
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of set command at 12/26/2007 11:06:45
ORA-01858: a non-numeric character was found where a numeric was expected
Is this a format issue? Any tips please!
Thanks,
DA

Answer 1

You can only register a database once if you are using a recovery catalog, so whoever or whatever told you to re-register is simply getting their terminology in a knot!
There **is** a sort-of "re-register" command which does sometimes need to be issued after a resetlogs: it's called a RESET command. See http://tinyurl.com/29t5lr for details. A "reset" is, effectively, a "re-register".
One of the details you will see is that you only need to do a manual reset if it was **you** that issued a resetlogs, outside of RMAN. If you get RMAN to do the resetlogs, however, then there's no need to also issue the reset command, because RMAN already knows about it (and has already updated its own metadata accordingly).
The other thing you'll notice from the documentation is that if you aren't using a recovery catalog then the concept of issuing a reset is entirely redundant. That's because you can't recover to a prior incarnation of the database without a catalog: it's one of the main reasons for wanting to run in catalog mode in the first place. No catalog = no ability to step through incarnations = no need to inform RMAN that you're in a new incarnation.