Configuring the Fast Recovery Area

If you did not specify a location for the fast recovery area during installation, the installation process automatically configures a fast recovery area in the Oracle base directory. Oracle recommends, however, that the fast recovery area be located on a separate storage device from the database files.

You can modify the following initialization parameters to relocate the fast recovery area and to adjust its size:

  • DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST

    Specifies the location of the fast recovery area. This can be a file system directory or an Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) disk group, but not a raw disk.

  • DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST_SIZE

    Specifies the size of the fast recovery area, in bytes.

The DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST_SIZE parameter must be set before the DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST parameter.

You can set these parameters without having to shut down and restart the database. In an Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) database, all instances must have the same values for these initialization parameters. The location must be on a cluster file system, Oracle ASM, or a shared directory.

To configure the fast recovery area:

Assume that you want to want to place the fast recovery area in the directory /u02/oracle/fra and you want its size to have an upper limit of 10 GB.

  1. Connect Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to the target database as described in "Connecting to the Target Database Using RMAN."
  2. Specify the size of the fast recovery area using the following command: 
    ALTER SYSTEM SET DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST_SIZE = 10G;
  3. Specify the location of the fast recovery area using the following command: 
    ALTER SYSTEM SET DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST = '/u02/oracle/fra';

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