Miladin Modrakovic's Blog: Oraclue

I was trying to duplicate  production database to development  using  11g feature DUPLICATE DATABASE … FROM ACTIVE DATABASE .

I did it in the past and worked every time but not today..

e.g.

RUN
{ 
  ALLOCATE CHANNEL ch1 DEVICE TYPE disk; 
  ALLOCATE AUXILIARY CHANNEL ach1 DEVICE TYPE disk;
  duplicate target database to test from active database;
  }

Scripts will run fine until end and then RMAN will give error

RMAN-06004: ORACLE error from recovery catalog database: RMAN-20242: specification does not match any archived log in the recovery catalog

I tried few times but without success..  Then I have realized that must be issue with archive log destination parameters etc..

The reason my duplicate command  worked in the past is that I did not have data guard configured.RMAN does not like to have  standby archivelog destinations configured.

This is Oracle Bug 6603587.

Workaround:
  For DUPLICATE DATABASE FOR STANDBY FROM ACTIVE, simply avoid using the
  DORECOVER clause.  Logs will ship naturally as part of the standby log
  shipping.

  For DUPLICATE TARGET DATABASE foo FROM ACTIVE, defer all standby destinations
  prior to executing the command.

I think RMAN should be called BUGMAN.