
Roman Milert - Fotolia
Was incremental backup differential or cumulative?
Is there a way to tell whether an incremental backup was done in a differential or cumulative manner in RMAN?
The RC_BACKUP_SET view can be used to determine this information. The BACKUP_TYPE column indicates if the backup is a full or incremental level 0 if this column contains 'D.' If the column contains 'I,' the backup set is for an incremental backup. The INCREMENTAL_LEVEL column shows the incremental level (obviously). If you are not seeing any rows in this view where BACKUP_TYPE='I' and INCREMENTAL_LEVEL='0' then look for BACKUP_TYPE='D.'
Chapter 3 of the RMAN documentation describes all of the Recovery Catalog views.