Did you guys ever performed RMAN DUPLICATION from a production backup which has block change tracking (BCT) enabled ?

I had to duplicate only one application tablespace to an AUXIL instance on test server from the backups of production.

I used RMAN script as below:

SERVER1\:/flash/data/auxil/auxil >rman auxiliary /Recovery Manager: Release 11.2.0.3.0 – Production on Thu Oct 30 03:51:11 2014
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connected to auxiliary database: AUXIL (not mounted)

RMAN> run
{
duplicate target database to AUXIL tablespace ‘TABLESPACE1′ until time “to_date(’19-10-2014 09:00′,’DD-MM-YYYY HH24:MI’)” backup location ‘/flash/data/flash_recovery_area/DB1’;
}

This RMAN DUPLICATION will do a successful restoration and fails after recovering almost 80% of the archive log files with the error:

………………..
archived log file name=/flash/data/flash_recovery_area/archivelog/2014_10_19/o1_mf_1_63113_b460sz9x_.arc thread=1 sequence=63113
archived log file name=/flash/data/flash_recovery_area/archivelog/2014_10_19/o1_mf_1_63114_b4612mh9_.arc thread=1 sequence=63114
archived log file name=/flash/data/flash_recovery_area/STAGE04/STAGE04/archivelog/2014_10_19/o1_mf_1_63115
_b461bom0_.arc thread=1 sequence=63115
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 10/30/2014 05:18:44
RMAN-05501: aborting duplication of target database
RMAN-03015: error occurred in stored script Memory Script
ORA-00283: recovery session canceled due to errors
RMAN-11003: failure during parse/execution of SQL statement: alter database recover logfile ‘/flash/data/flash_recovery_area/archivelog/2014_10_19/o1_mf_1_63115_b461bom0_.arc’
ORA-00283: recovery session canceled due to errors
ORA-19755: could not open change tracking file
ORA-19750: change tracking file: ‘/user1/data/oradata/STAGE04/changetracking/o1_mf_9bgcq523_.chg’
ORA-27037: unable to obtain file status
IBM AIX RISC System/6000 Error: 2: No such file or directory

Don’t  you think, why RMAN is looking out for Block CHANGE tracking file during the recovery of the datafiles?

Action Items:

I have raised this case to Oracle Support and they advised the following:

1. Apply the patch 11744544 and issue set newname for block change tracking file to new; – This doesnt work as the error says that it is unable to find BCT, then what benefits us renaming it.
2. Asked to disable BCT on production and take the backup to restore – This is not at all possible, will you ever disable a BCT on production where daily incremental backups are scheduled?
3. To set autoextend off on datafiles – This seems to be fine, but we have been using BIGFILE tablespaces with autoextend on, so doesnt imply us.

Conclusion:

A new Bug 20301188 has been raised by oracle and development is still working. It has been more than 9 months and still development is working on this 🙂