Description: An RMAN channel represents one stream of data to a device type and corresponds to one server session. It establishes a connection from the RMAN executable to a target database instance by starting a new server session on the instance. The server session then performs the backup, restore, and recovery operations. Only one RMAN session communicates with all the allocated server sessions. RMAN channels are of two types, DISK and sbt. If the channel is of DISK type, the server process reads backups from or writes backups to the disk. If the channel is of sbt type, the server process reads backups from or writes backups to a third-party media (e.g., tape). Channels are always able to read and write backups to and from a disk regardless of their type.
