RMAN in Oracle Database 26ai: What Has Changed and Why It Matters
A practitioner's guide to the new encryption defaults, backup mobility, recovery catalog enhancements, and the features Oracle has quietly retired. Executive Overview Oracle Database 26ai delivers one of the most substantial refreshes to Recovery Manager (RMAN) in recent memory. The release strengthens encryption defaults, makes backups significantly more portable across storage classes, modernizes recovery catalog operations, and removes several long-standing features from the supported toolkit. Most of these enhancements directly improve operational flexibility and security posture. A few, however, introduce subtle behavioral inconsistencies between the documentation and runtime metadata that administrators should verify in their own environments before relying on them in production. This article distills the most consequential RMAN changes in 26ai — what is new, what is gone, what to validate, and how to adapt your operational playbooks accordingly. Contents Summary of RMAN Chan...