I am a real DBA now!

Once I've been told is that to be a real DBA you need to do at least one restore a production system from RMAN backup...I think, I came close to that :-) - yesterday night I was able to create a duplicate instance from our production Level-0 (around 200 GB of data restored from tape over the weekend). Although, it was a very long night!

For all my sins (and because our real DBA is on vacations) this task landed on my laps last week - and since then I started to truly appreciate the work of honest-to-god administrators, non semi-architects/semi-developers like me.

OK, I will stop ranting... A couple of useful remarks:
- Arup/Sam/Darl, I owe you at least one round of good drinks! Your book "RMAN Recipes for Oracle Database 11G" helped me a lot!
- As usual, around midnight I've hit an brick wall. RMAN was complaining about a space "somewhere", I've spent another hour trying to figure what it was about. And eventually I discovered the solution in the bug-list (#8631293):

Description
 * RMAN Duplicate command signals RMAN-06561 (available space must be larger than NNN kb) when the recovery area parameter is set.
Workaround
* The workaround is not to set db_recovery_file_dest and db_recovery_file_dest_size parameters in the init.ora

Expert PL/SQL Practices on sale!

My (to be fair - our) new book is waiting for everybody! Sales started today - here is a link from Amazon:
"Expert PL/SQL Practices"

It was a very interesting project to participate - and huge thanks to Jonathan Gennick from Apress who was brave enough to take the challenge of herding together 15 different authors. To our own surprise the book came together even faster than anybody anticipated - by at least a month. Looks like PL/SQL authors are more disciplined comparing to everybody else :-)

Good reading to everyone!