Like others have mentioned, cloning provides you with the ability to take a copy of a production environment and use it for development, testing patches and configuration changes before you make them into production, etc. There are a couple of ways to clone a database but the easiest is to use RMANs duplicate feature. Its very easy to automate a clone and I even have some databases which are refreshed nightly with a copy of production. On 12/17/08, Dennis Williams <oracledba.williams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Nilesh > > 1. Some databases are so large that cloning is the only method of creating a > test database. > 2. Before a production change is made, it is recommended that change be made > in a test database and then tested. This can avoid the awkward situation of > production changes that need to be backed out. Cloning produces an exact > copy of the production database. > > Dennis Williams > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l