Cloning a test or development environment after the backup has been taken from the production environment is a very good opportunity to test if the backup will serve its purpose. This is not the only time when a database clone is required, there are several other scenarios, such as providing a fresh environment for developers and pre-production environments, manually setting up a disaster recovery site, upgrade preparation, and performance and stress testing, to name just a few.
Let's assume we have a Source Database named SRCDB and the target database, named CLONEDB. A Unix like environment is assumed, but this can be implemented on Windows as well, just be aware of the particular Oracle implementation on a Windows platform (orapwd file name, service creation, path format).
When performing the clone process, two channels must be open, one for the target database, and the second one for the auxiliary database. The auxiliary connection performs the...