While I like a lot monitoring capabilities and extensibility of Oracle 10g Grid Control it’s lacking a lot in Web GUI usability and ease of use.

Currently we are moving from Oracle Enterprise Manager 9i to Grid Control 10g for one of our client. This client uses many features of OEM besides monitoring - job management, Data Guard and others. One of the requirements to move backups to Grid Control 10g is to be able to schedule incremental level 1 backup to run Only Monday to Friday or on certain days of a month.

The latest release of Grid Control (10.2.0.3 at the time of this writing) is only able to schedule backup jobs with simple interval based on frequency (every month, week and etc). Here is the schedule screen from Web GUI:

So if you want to schedule incremental backup from Backup Wizard - you will have to do a trick. First create this job using the wizard and then change its schedule. When you editing the job - more options are available:

I remember that I wasn’t able to do that in some earlier versions — was getting error message that it cannot edit this particular job type. Actually, I think just few days ago I’ve got it in Database Control 10.2.0.3 so it seems same releases of Database Control and Grid Control do not quite share the same code base release.

What still bothers me is that I cannot copy backup job to the Job Library - getting the error Copy To Library is not supported for this job type. Another problem is that I still couldn’t really edit the RMAN script itself later - Backup wizard is not re-entrant in 10g Grid Control like it is in OEM 9i: