QUESTION: RMAN Database duplication

Hey, all.

I'm looking to use RMAN (8i on AIX) to duplicate a database from one server to another.

Specifically, we regularly do a refresh of production data down to our staging environment. These two environments are on different physical servers and in different file locations on these servers.

At this point we are using a cold backup: drop production, backup and compress each file, and run scripts which will result in a new control file script and restore script on the target host.

I'd like to use RMAN to facilitate/simplify this process.

The RMAN documentation indicates that this cannot be done unless the file copies are written to the same file locations on the new host.

I'm unclear on why this is not possible; if all the information in a backup set is contained in the backup set, and if it's possible to duplicate a database to different file locations on _the same_ host, why the dependence on the host?

Does anyone out there use RMAN for this type of purposes? Is there any way around this restriction of the target file locations?

Thanks!

BD Received on Thu Sep 22 2005 - 11:25:11 CDT