Enabling and disabling block change tracking

Block changing tracking records changed blocks in a tracking file. This technique can improve the performance of RMAN incremental backups. For more information, see Using Block Change Tracking to Improve Incremental Backup Performance in the Oracle Database documentation.

RMAN features aren't supported in a read replica. However, as part of your high availability strategy, you might choose to enable block tracking in a read-only replica using the procedure rdsadmin.rdsadmin_rman_util.enable_block_change_tracking. If you promote this read-only replica to a source DB instance, block change tracking is enabled for the new source instance. Thus, your instance can benefit from fast incremental backups.

Block change tracking procedures are supported in Enterprise Edition only for the following DB engine versions:

To enable block change tracking for a DB instance, use the Amazon RDS procedure rdsadmin.rdsadmin_rman_util.enable_block_change_tracking. To disable block change tracking, use disable_block_change_tracking. These procedures take no parameters.

To determine whether block change tracking is enabled for your DB instance, run the following query.

SELECT STATUS, FILENAME FROM V$BLOCK_CHANGE_TRACKING;

The following example enables block change tracking for a DB instance.

EXEC rdsadmin.rdsadmin_rman_util.enable_block_change_tracking;

The following example disables block change tracking for a DB instance.

EXEC rdsadmin.rdsadmin_rman_util.disable_block_change_tracking;