Deleting Archived Redo Logs after a Successful Backup

If you have configured the automatic channels as defined in section "Channel Connections to Cluster Instances with RMAN", then you can use the following example to delete the archived logs that you backed up n times. The device type can be DISK or SBT:

DELETE ARCHIVELOG ALL BACKED UP n TIMES TO DEVICE TYPE device_type;

During a delete operation, if at least one channel allocated has access to the archived log, then RMAN automatically schedules the deletion of the specific log on that channel. For a local archiving scheme, there must be at least one channel allocated that can delete an archived log. For a cluster file system archiving scheme, if every node writes to the archived logs on the same cluster file system, then the archived log can be deleted by any allocated channel.

If you have not configured automatic channels, then you can manually allocate the maintenance channels as follows and delete the archived logs.

ALLOCATE CHANNEL FOR MAINTENANCE DEVICE TYPE DISK CONNECT 'SYS/oracle@node1';
ALLOCATE CHANNEL FOR MAINTENANCE DEVICE TYPE DISK CONNECT 'SYS/oracle@node2';
ALLOCATE CHANNEL FOR MAINTENANCE DEVICE TYPE DISK CONNECT 'SYS/oracle@node3';
DELETE ARCHIVELOG ALL BACKED UP n TIMES TO DEVICE TYPE device_type;