read only

This one is to be filed under the “little things I didn’t really know until now” section: RMAN duplicate. Be honest to yourself: would you have known the answer to this question: what happens to tablespaces which are read-only on the source during an RMAN duplication (not for standby)?

Some background

I have started my career as a DBA on Oracle 8.1.7.0, and at the time not everyone fully embraced RMAN. OK, RMAN made it really hard at the time to fall in love with it. So when we “cloned” our production database to development, the following steps were followed: