Chapter 11: Cloning

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Overview

If activities surrounding patching take up half of your time as an Apps DBA, cloning can easily take up half of what is left. Not all of the time is taken up with activity. It can easily be an hour of activity followed by five hours of watching files copy followed by an hour of activity.

You can think of it in this scenario; you are considering a test run of making changes to your now increasingly familiar desert and you want to get somewhat comfortable with what those changes are before you make them the real environment that is now your primary home. So you are not completely surprised by the radical changes in your real home, you are going to make test changes to duplicate environments to make sure that you know what changes are going to be made, and to make sure that you can live with the changes once they are made. To facilitate this, you set about making almost exact replicas of your environment in slightly different places and you use these copies as places to test out changes. Cloning is how you get these changes to be where they need to be when they need to be there.

One typically thinks of cloning as creating an exact duplicate of the original and while that is the basic primary definition of the word cloning, Dictionary.com also provides the following two definitions that more closely represent what the reality of cloning is in Oracle E-Business Suite:

1. One that copies or closely resembles another, as in appearance or function: "filled with business-school clones in gray and blue suits" (Michael M. Thomas).

2. To produce a copy of; imitate closely: "The look has been cloned into cliché" (Cathleen McGuigan).

While there are many reasons to clone an application, including migrating the existing system to new hardware and creating an area where you can apply patches safely, one of the most common reasons for cloning is to create a copy of Production to allow for more realistic testing of updates and changes.

Before we get started, a little new vocabulary goes along with the new topic.

• Source system: Environment being cloned, the "from" system

• Target system: Environment being created as a copy, the "to" system

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