For more than ten years now SAP has provided a unified way to administer the Oracle database via the BR*Tools (Backup/Recovery).
Wether you like the tools or not (if you read We all hate the BR*TOOLS, don’t we? about it, perhabs you’ll at least get used to them) they are used in every SAP installations that runs on Oracle. Although these tools got improved and enhanced in many ways over the years there is one thing that seemed to be fundamentally stable:
This is also mentioned in SAP note 968507 – Considerable enhancements to backups using BR*Tools 7.00.
For those interested how I analyzed this: I used FILEMON from the well-known SYSINTERNALS toolkit (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx ).
On Windows systems the tools of this toolkit are really helpful to dig a level deeper.
Best regards,
Lars