Last week, I had to refresh a training database with data from production. In order to do this, I used Active Database Duplication from ASM to disk. This feature, introduced in 11g, allows you to duplicate a database from a live database instead of from the RMAN backup.

The datafiles for this database are on a filesystem. We are in the process of migrating the databases to new servers and moving them to ASM. I wanted to reduce the RMAN impact on production by using one of the test databases that are running on ASM as the source for the duplication. This meant moving the datafiles of the test database from ASM to disk.

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