Hi, I agree with Tim fully, but thinking about the combination "rman and fragmentation" at all left me wondering, maybe I learn something new... I'm not immensely familiar with how rman works internally, but I was under the impression that it does a block-by-block copy of whatever it backs up/restores. So I don't really see how even with incremental backups any kind of fragmentation increase/decrease because of rman operations should be possible. The data inside the blocks may be fragmented, but rman doesn't look inside the blocks - does it? Block is marked as changed in the tracking file - back it up. Block is restored? Take that block from the last full backup. Replace the block with the one of the incremental backup if there's a newer version (if it even does that or takes the one of the incremental backup right away, don't know). Same content / fragmentation as during the time of backup. Also, even with non-default filesperset and section size settings - doesn't rman restore just put block by block back to order where it copied them from during backup? It shouldn't matter if I grab blocks 1, 2, 3, and 4 from slots A, B, C and D at the same time or sequentially and place blocks 1, 2, 3 and 4 back to their original order. If it would indeed change anything in that regard, I'd expect rman to reorganize the data as datapump does when using just one channel, 1 file per set and everything else at default - which it doesn't. Maybe my understanding is flawed here. If so, please tell me. Best regards, Robert On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Radoulov, Dimitre <cichomitiko@xxxxxxxxx>wrote: > On 04/09/2012 12:38, Kenneth Naim wrote: > > Rman just allocates the number of datafiles by the number of datafiles > so it > > you have 120 files and 6 channels, each channel would eventually backup > 20 > > files so no fragmentation is possible with a full backup. > > Bigfile tablespace multichannel backup with section size is another case, > I don't know if that could lead to performance problems after a restore > tough ... > > > Regards > Dimitre > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l