Performing Complete Recovery - RMAN Recipes for Oracle Database 12c - page 334

If you know the SCN in a backup piece that you want to restore from, you can specify the SCN as follows:
RMAN> startup mount;
RMAN> restore database until scn 1254174;
RMAN> recover database;
RMAN> alter database open;
Or if you know the log sequence number that you want to restore up to, the syntax is as follows:
RMAN> startup mount;
RMAN> restore database until sequence 17;
RMAN> recover database;
RMAN> alter database open;
If you've created restore points, you can also use the restore point name as follows:
RMAN> startup mount;
RMAN> restore database until restore point FRI_RS;
RMAN> recover database;
RMAN> alter database open;
You can also specify a point in time from which you want RMAN to restore an older backup. This example
instructs RMAN to retrieve the first backup it finds that is more than 1 day old:
RMAN> startup mount;
RMAN> restore database until time 'sysdate - 1';
RMAN> recover database;
RMAN> alter database open;
Here we're specifically instructing RMAN to restore from a date and time. Since we don't instruct RMAN to
recover to a point in time, this example will perform a complete recovery:
RMAN> startup mount;
RMAN> restore database until time
"to_date('05-aug-2012 15:45:00', 'dd-mon-rrrr hh24:mi:ss')";
RMAN> recover database;
RMAN> alter database open;
How It Works
You can easily instruct RMAN to restore from backups older than the most recent backup set. You can do this by
specifying a backup tag name or using the restore ... until command. You may want to do this because you're
missing a recent backup file. In this case, the required backup may be one older than the current one.
Keep in mind that starting with Oracle Database 10 g , by default RMAN will look in older backups if it can't find a
backup piece or if corruption is detected. RMAN will search through backup history until it locates a good backup or
until it exhausts all possibilities. This feature is called restore failover .