The error above simply means that the target database is not registered in the catalog. To understand how to solve this error, we will explain some crucial terminology. (RMAN-20001: Target Database Not Found In Recovery Catalog, 2015)

 

RMAN

Oracle RMAN is the Oracle Recovery Manager which is a built-in tool used for backup and recovery. We first saw this tool in Oracle 8.0 and has become one of the standard tools used by Database Administrators. If you would like to learn more about restoring a database using RMAN, click here.

 

RMAN client

The RMAN client is a command line client which allows the user to make use of RMAN commands to handle backup and recovery requests. It is important to note that Enterprise Manager makes use of RMAN client to perform its backup and recovery requests as well.

(Oracle)

 

Target database

The target database is the database which in case of a backup, is backed up and in case of a restoration, is the database which the restoration will happen to.

You can start RMAN and connect to the target database as follows,

% rman              

               RMAN> CONNECT TARGET /

If you do not have SYSDBA privileges, the connection will fail and return an error. (Oracle, Connecting to Databases with RMAN)

 

Catalog

A recovery catalog is nothing more than a database schema which is used for metadata storage for the databases and is used in the case that the control file and backups are missing or corrupted. (Oracle, Database Backup and Recovery User’s Guide)

There are other uses of the catalog, such as gathering the files generated during backup and moving to the RMAN repository. Another use is that the Catalog saves a level 0 incremental backup in RMAN repository. (Oracle, Catalog)

 

Starting RMAN

There are four ways you can start RMAN

1. With a catalog

       % rman TARGET / CATALOG rman/cat@catdb

 

2. Without a catalog

% rman TARGET SYS/oracle@trgt NOCATALOG

 

3. With an auxiliary

An auxiliary database is a database where it is either a standby instance or a tablespace point-in-time recovery instance.

 

% rman TARGET / CATALOG rman/cat@catdb AUXILIARY SYS/oracle@auxdb 

 

4. Without any connection options

In other words, this means that the user will be connecting to RMAN without connecting to a database.

% rman

 

(Oracle, Connecting to Databases with RMAN)

 

How to fix the problem

The problem causing this RMAN-20001 error to occur is due to the database not being registered with the catalog. To solve this issue the user must simply add register the database to the catalog by first unregistering and then registering the database.

 

How to register a database

Below we will give you the steps to unregister and then register the database with the catalog.

 

Steps to follow:

1. Connect to RMAN Catalog

rman target / catalog rman_user/rman_password@catdb

where

rman_user is the rman username

rman_password is the rman password

catdb is the catalog

 

2. Unregister database

RMAN > unregister database noprompt;

 

3. register database

RMAN> register database;

 

This should solve your problem and will stop returning the RMAN-20001 error message.

 

References

Oracle. (n.d.). Catalog. Retrieved from Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/html/E10643_07/rcmsynta008.htm

Oracle. (n.d.). Connecting to Databases with RMAN. Retrieved from Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B14117_01/server.101/b10734/rcmcnctg.htm

Oracle. (n.d.). Connecting to Databases with RMAN. Retrieved from Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/A97630_01/server.920/a96566/rcmcnctg.htm

Oracle. (n.d.). Database Backup and Recovery User’s Guide. Retrieved from Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/backup.111/b28270/rcmcatdb.htm#BRADV8015

Oracle. (n.d.). RMAN Command Line Client. Retrieved from Stanford: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/itss/docs/oracle/10gR2/backup.102/b14191/rcmarchi002.htm

RMAN-20001: Target Database Not Found In Recovery Catalog. (2015, November 24). Retrieved from DBACLASS: http://dbaclass.com/article/rman-20001-target-database-not-found-in-recovery-catalog/