Welcome to the world of Database Administration... and good luck. You're going to want to read up on as much Oracle documentation as you can, as well as other good technical sources (O'Reilly has always been good), and subscribe to lots of Oracle blogs.
I'll answer your questions here, but you're really going to want to get a solid foundation in RMAN ( For 10gR2: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/portal.portal_db?selected=4 ).
1.Do you have to shutdown your Oracle DB when you want to make a copy/clone of it?
Yes and no. It depends on if your database is in archivelog mode. If the database is archiving its logs, the backup can be done while your database is online, though you may notice some performance degradation during the backup, so it is still a good idea to schedule the backup during a non-critical time of day. If the database is not archiving the logs, then you must shutdown the database cleanly in order to make a copy of it (any other way will result in a corrupt/incomplete restore).
2.A good beginner example
This is hard to do without knowing your environment. There are various RMAN commands that will happily clone a database on the same server, but when you get into moving a clone from one server to another, you have to go a different route. So without knowing your environment, I can't really tell you a good example.
That said, essentially your goal is to do the following:
- Get a good copy of all your datafiles
- Get a good copy of all your archive logs
- Get a good copy of your database parameters and control file
- Create a new database with the settings from your old database (or reuse an existing database)
- Copy over your datafiles and archive logs
- Restore from your controlfile, and recover until there are no archives to process.
RMAN does a lot of the work for you with some fairly simple commands, so I suggest learning how to use it effectively, but you can always do the hard work without it. (For a long time at a previous workplace, we did this with some shell scripts and such. Fun it was not, and was easy to screw up.)
3.Does a GUI exist for cloning an Oracle Database?
I think the thing that comes closest would be Oracle Enterprise Manager (GRID). It offers several automated backup/restore options as well as cloning features. Keep in mind, however, that it uses RMAN under-the-hood, and you should never use a tool blindly without understanding what's going on underneath. Sooner or later, you'll need to delve down into the command line because the GUI won't do what you want it to do, and without a good understanding, you'll be stuck.
SET NEWNAME works for RESTORE and SWITCH, but not for RECOVER. Datafiles had been renamed and switched before the recovery started.
There is a flaw in your process though, and the above issue is its side effect:
Restore the control file from the 3/9 backup.
Why? You do a nearly complete recovery to get as close as possible to the current state, not the state on 3/9. Restore the controlfile from the latest backup taken on 3/14.
Since the restored control files aren't aware of the backup pieces for 3/10 - 3/14, I run this for each
This step is unnecessary if you use the latest controlfile.
Best Answer
Of course you can, if you can cleanly shut down your old database and it is consistent. A little reading of the documentation or googele-fu would have helped. Searching this site would have provided this excellent answer.
But: what do you want to achieve? If it really is an issue with the patch and your hardware configuration, why do you expect your clone to be not affected? Is only your SQL*Net communication not possible or does e.g. RDP not work, too?
So before cloning the database without knowing the root cause I would suggest some further investigation and searching MOS. If it really is an MS patch issue that stops SQL*Net from working, there will be almost certainly a note there.
Some peeking in your firewall configuration might help, too, perhaps it is a trivial think like the patch has (re)activated your internal windows firewall.