All Does anyone with large retention policies for rman backups on their systems have an indication of how many backup records I can reasonably expect to retain in a controlfile in addition to an RMAN catalog. I'm aware that a controlfile is limited to 20,000 blocks and that both backup and archivelog records get recorded here. I'm wondering at what sort of retention period a catalog really becomes necessary - i.e what sort of practical limits people have found before the control file cannot record the required backup information to meet their redundancy policies. I'm aware that transaction volume, backup frequency, #datafiles etc have a big impact. Any bugs people have run into with 20k block controlfiles would be well worth knowing as well. :( -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info