The Legacy Obituaries

Notices of desupport & departureOracle Database → AzureTuesday, 29 September 2026The Coroner’s ReportsAbout this paper

RMAN backup and recovery

pre-11.2 · ha

Lives on unchanged in Azure.

✓ certified by the mortician

In life

Recovery Manager is Oracle's backup and recovery utility. It takes full and incremental backups of data files, control files and archived redo, tracks them in the control file or a recovery catalog, and drives restore and recovery to a point in time. It integrates with media managers, block change tracking and Data Guard, and its scripts are the backbone of most Oracle operations runbooks.

Migrations care because backup strategy changes shape. Azure SQL and PostgreSQL Flexible Server manage backups and point-in-time restore themselves, so RMAN scripts, retention policies and catalog maintenance are retired rather than converted, while Oracle on Azure virtual machines and Oracle Database@Azure keep RMAN as the recovery tool. Recovery objectives expressed in RMAN terms must be re-stated in the target's terms.

RMAN is supported and not deprecated. The 26ai Upgrade Guide desupports two of its pieces: the Data Recovery Advisor commands and the RECOVER with SNAPSHOT TIME syntax, recommending the begin and end backup approach for the latter.

Cause of departure

Not deprecated by Oracle. Listed here because Azure offers no clean equivalent.

Obituary

RMAN backup and recovery, born before 11.2, managed Oracle backups, recovery, scripts, catalogs and retention policies. It served as the practiced hand behind carefully arranged recoveries.

Its passage to Azure SQL Managed Instance was blocked by a narrower regime: service-managed backups and user-initiated COPY_ONLY full backups to Blob Storage. Differential and log backups cannot be user-initiated, while native restores reach only SQL Server 2022/2025 or another managed instance.

It is survived by Azure SQL Managed Instance, only by workaround, where RMAN machinery is retired rather than ported. It is also survived by Oracle Database@Azure, where it lives on unchanged, with existing scripts and retention policies carrying over.

Survived by

Oracle Database@Azure exact effort S

Applies to Oracle 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 18c, 19c, 21c, 23ai, 26ai

On Oracle Database@Azure RMAN is fully available: OCI-managed automatic backups use Autonomous Recovery Service or OCI Object Storage, self-managed RMAN backups can stream to Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files or Azure NetApp Files, and third-party agents from the marketplace are supported. Existing RMAN scripts and retention policies carry over, with the option to keep backup data inside Azure.

  • Choose OCI-managed backups for simplicity or self-managed RMAN to Azure storage when data must stay in Azure.
  • Mount Blob, Files or NetApp Files volumes on the database nodes for RMAN channels.
  • Schedule with cron on the nodes and monitor through Azure Monitor logs.

Azure SQL Managed Instance workaround effort M

Applies to Oracle 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 18c, 19c, 21c, 23ai, 26ai

Managed Instance replaces RMAN with service-managed backups: automatic full, differential and log backups with 1-35 day point-in-time restore and up to 10 years of long-term retention, plus user-initiated COPY_ONLY full backups to Blob Storage. Users cannot run differential or log backups, cannot restore with WITH options, and can restore native backups only to SQL Server 2022/2025 or another managed instance, so RMAN scripts, catalogs and retention policies are retired rather than ported.

  • Set short-term retention and long-term retention policies to match the RMAN retention window.
  • Replace ad hoc RMAN backups with BACKUP DATABASE ... TO URL WITH COPY_ONLY when an out-of-band copy is needed.
  • Use point-in-time restore and geo-restore instead of RMAN recovery scripts.
  • For customer-managed TDE, keep key versions available or COPY_ONLY backups cannot be restored.

Complications

major On Managed Instance user backups must be COPY_ONLY full backups TO URL (Blob Storage) with up to 32 stripes and a 195 GB stripe limit; differential, log and file-snapshot backups are not user-initiated, databases under service-managed TDE cannot be backed up with COPY_ONLY, and native backups restore only to SQL Server 2022/2025 or another managed instance.
· General Purpose, Next-gen General Purpose, Business Critical · microsoft T-SQL differences between SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance

Notices of correction

  1. oracle Topics for Database Administrators and Developers (Database Concepts 19c) · Database Concepts 19c, E96138-11, Sep 2025 · read 2026-09-26
  2. oracle Oracle Database Changes, Desupports, and Deprecations (Upgrade Guide 26ai) · Upgrade Guide 26ai, G43570-12, updated Jul 2026 · read 2026-09-26
  3. microsoft Business continuity and disaster recovery for Oracle Database@Azure (Exadata Database Service) · page updated 2026-08-27; carries a deprecation notice (removal planned 2026-10-30) · read 2026-09-26
  4. microsoft Overview: Oracle Database@Azure · page updated 2026-09-15 · read 2026-09-26
  5. microsoft T-SQL differences between SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance · page updated 2026-09-09 · read 2026-09-26
  6. microsoft Compare SQL Database Engine features: Azure SQL Database vs Azure SQL Managed Instance · page updated 2026-09-09 · read 2026-09-26

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RMAN backup and recovery — Legacy Obituaries