Performing Oracle Advanced Recovery - OCP: Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certified Professional - page 313

WITH TAG 'incremental_update';
BACKUP
INCREMENTAL LEVEL 1
FOR RECOVER OF COPY WITH TAG 'incremental_update' DATABASE PLUS ARCHIVELOG
DELETE INPUT;
}
The Second Execution of the Command
During the second execution of the RECOVER COPY OF DATABASE command, RMAN will
find the previously created full backup, with the tag name applied. However, there will be
no incremental backups found to apply to that backup since we have not made an incre-
mental backup yet. So, the RECOVER COPY OF DATABASE command still has no real function.
As a result, the command simply does nothing but send a notification messages.
The BACKUP command in this case will perform a level 1 incremental backup, since there
is already a level 0 base copy available. So, after the second execution of the command, we
will have one full image copy and one incremental RMAN backup of the database. Also,
since we told it to back up the archived redo logs, they will be backed up as well.
One thing we should make clear is the distinction between the first full backup of the
database and the subsequent incremental backup. The first full backup of the database is an
image copy, as we mentioned previously. The subsequent incremental backups will be RMAN
incremental backups, and as such, they are stored in RMAN backup sets. Thus, they can take
advantage of RMAN features such as compression as seen in this example:
Run {
RECOVER COPY OF DATABASE
WITH TAG 'incremental_update';
BACKUP AS COMPRESSED BACKUPSET
INCREMENTAL LEVEL 1
FOR RECOVER OF COPY WITH TAG 'incremental_update' DATABASE
PLUS ARCHIVELOG DELETE INPUT;
}
The Third Execution of the Command
The third execution of this set of commands is where the real magic happens, and it also
requires us to do a little bit of thinking.
The third execution of this set of commands, by default, will cause the last incremental
backup to be restored and applied to the image copy of the database that was originally
taken. Thus, the image copy of the database now looks like the database looked on the