Finally overcoming my writing blockade, here's something I found recently.

During a discussion in the OTN XE Forum (which, unfortunately, requires additional authentification) in the thread ISV - Bundle Oracle XE install into Software Install I suggested to use a seed db for software installation as shown in the installation process of XE.

Since Oracle provides said installation procedure as shell scripts (both Windows and Linux), I took a peek at the script rmanRestoreDatafiles.sql in the directory /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/config/scripts. Seems like this installation process uses an internal package for recovering the necessary tablescripts instead of a RMAN call, as shown in the shell scripts backup.sh or restore.sh in the same directory.

The name of that installation script hints that DBMS_BACKUP_RESTORE is a wrapper for RMAN, however I couldn't find a chapter on this in the 10g2 documentation, only a few references, for example an error message. Anyway, according to that script DBMS_BACKUP_RESTORE has several procedures/functions with names that seem self explanatory:

deviceAllocate
restoreSetDataFile
restoreDataFileTo
restoreBackupPiece
deviceDeallocate

While developing my CMS lite app I sometimes need to have a look at the state of certain regions or package function/procedures results. Thanks to the chapter Debugging an Application in the Application Express User's Guide I started with the #timing# tag, which does provide some information on the execution time (per region) which you can see at the bottom of my page. But I wanted also some output on packages, so I searched OTN and found a nice introduction at Injecting custom debug output into debug mode. The rest is easy, using a debug procedure (which is part of a package) that will work both inside SQL*PLUS (or any other tool) and APEX:

  PROCEDURE Debug(
    p_Message IN VARCHAR2
  )
  IS
   BEGIN
     IF v_Debug_Mode
     THEN
        DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(p_Message);
     ELSIF wwv_flow.g_debug
     THEN
        htp.p(p_Message || '<br>');
     END IF;
  END Debug;

  PROCEDURE Debug(
    p_Message IN VARCHAR2
  )
  IS
   BEGIN
     IF v_Debug_Mode
     THEN
        DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(p_Message);
     ELSIF wwv_flow.g_debug
     THEN
        wwv_flow.debug(p_Message);
     END IF;
  END Debug;