RMAN is the only available method to migrate from and to ASM environments. ASM is an efficient and reliable storage mechanism that first appeared in 10g Rel. 1. There are two ways to backup an ASM environment, one is by means of a low level disk dump, which performs a complete raw device dump and does not allow the DBA to select individual storage structures such as tablespaces or datafiles; the other method is by means of Recovery Manager. Today, ASM seems pretty complex and abstract for several DBAs, but once it is setup and is up and working, it is seamless to work with it, and it is quite the same as if it was a regular storage unit with tablespaces and datafiles. The flash recovery area, redologs, backups, and datafiles live in there and are managed just like any other regular database file.

The database could have been created in an ASM environment since the very beginning, but what about if this was not the case? Is there a means to move datafiles...