RMAN Restore and Recovery - Oracle RMAN for Absolute Beginners - page 169

RMAN restores the control files to the location defined by your CONTROL_FILES initialization parameter. You
should see a message indicating that your control files have been successfully copied back from an RMAN backup
piece. You can now alter your database into mount mode and perform any additional restore and recovery commands
required for your database.

■ When you restore a control file from a backup, you're required to perform media recovery on your entire
database and open your database with the OPEN RESETLOGS command, even if you didn't restore any data files. you can
determine whether your control file is a backup by querying the CONTROLFILE_TYPE column of the V$DATABASE view.

Note

Using an Autobackup
When you enable the autobackup of your control file and are using an FRA, restoring your control file is fairly
simple. First, connect to your target database, then issue a STARTUP NOMOUNT command, followed by the RESTORE
CONTROLFILE FROM AUTOBACKUP command, like this:

$ rman target /
RMAN> startup nomount;
RMAN> restore controlfile from autobackup;

RMAN restores the control files to the location defined by your CONTROL_FILES initialization parameter. You
should see a message indicating that your control files have been successfully copied back from an RMAN backup
piece. Here is a snippet of the output:

channel ORA_DISK_1: control file restore from AUTOBACKUP complete

You can now alter your database into mount mode and perform any additional restore and recovery commands
required for your database.

Specifying a Backup File Name
When restoring a database to a different server, these are generally the first few steps in the process take a backup
of the target database, copy to the remote server, and then restore the control file from the RMAN backup. In these
scenarios, I usually know the name of the backup piece that contains the control file. Here is an example in which you
instruct RMAN to restore a control file from a specific backup piece file:

RMAN> startup nomount;
RMAN> restore controlfile from
'/u01/O12C/rman/rman_ctl_c-3423216220-20130113-01.bk';

The control file will be restored to the location defined by the CONTROL_FILES initialization parameter.