Flash Recovery Area

  At my organization, we've written a custom process that monitors our archive destinations.  When the number of archive logs reaches a certain threshold the processes backs up the archive logs to a compressed backupset.  This reduces the disk space consumed by the archive logs throughout the day.  Once a day, a database backup is performed to tape.  At that time, the RMAN script also copies all of the archive log disk backupsets, created throughout the day, from disk to tape and deletes all input.

I've been testing a flash recovery area as the recovery file disk destination to see if Oracle can perform the same function itself without the need for our custom process.  Oracle's documentation states that the database will manage the recovery file space in the flash recovery area automatically by deleting expired backups or images.