Hi All,

I just came into a new environment and I've noticed that all RMAN (NMDA) backups have a browse and retention set in networker (4 weeks) and then, another one in RMAN which is set to 7 days. The DBAs do not want to keep anything past 7 days.

They do a delete obsolete in RMAN daily, then a crosscheck. What happens is that everything is deleted from the RMAN catalog based on the 7 days retention, then the crosscheck just "reinserts" everything back into the catalog, because it is still in networker!

So, what I wanted to do is give full control to RMAN for the retention instead of networker to make sure that everything is always in sync and is expired at the appropriate time (knowing that they do inc0, inc1 and inc2). After reading the NMDA guide, I found that you can simply "disable" retention control in networker by using "NSR_RETENTION_DISABLED".

I've added that option in the RMAN script, but when I try and do a full backup with that setting set to "TRUE", I immediately get the following error:

-> The retention time should not be shorter than the browse time: retention time: 1351231199, browse time: 2147483647. (105:108:11)

Is it looking at past backups which used to have their retention set in networker ? I thought that this setting would override both the browse and retention times.

Anyone has experience with the NSR_RETENTION_DISABLED option and let RMAN/Oracle control the retention ?

Thanks!