HOW TO SET NEWNAME CLAUSE 11G R2 AND ONWORD

Important Note: Oracle Introduce New Feature "SET NEWNAME" in Oracle 11g Release 2 for RMAN Utility to Database or Datafiles. Now a days DBAs are using this feature for restoration in Non ASM to ASM Databases and RAC Databases.

Set NEWNAME Flexibility :

Suppose you are restoring datafiles from the backup, either on the same server or a different one such as staging. If the filesystem (or diskgroup) names are identical, you won’t have to change anything. But that is hardly ever the case. In staging the filesystems may be different, or perhaps you are restoring a production database to an ASM diskgroup different from where it was originally created. In that case you have to let  RMAN know the new name of the datafile. The way to do it is using the SET NEWNAME command. Here is an example, where your restored files are located on /u02 instead of /u01 where they were codeviously.

run 

{

   set newname for datafile 1 to '/u02/oradata/system_01.dbf';

   set newname for datafile 2 to '/u02/oradata/sysaux_01.dbf';

   restore database;      … 

}

Here there are just two datafiles, but what if you have hundreds or even thousands? It will not only be a herculean task to enter all that information but it will be error-prone as well. Instead of entering each datafile by name, now you can use a single set newname clause for a tablespace. Here is how you can do it:

run 

{

 set newname for tablespace examples to '/u02/examples%b.dbf';

 … 

 … rest of the commands come here … 

}

If the tablespace has more than one datafile, they will all be uniquely created. You can use this clause for the entire database as well:

run 

{   

   set newname for database to '/u02/oradata/%b'; 

}

The term %b specifies the base filename without the path, e.g. /u01/oradata/file1.dbf will be recodesented as file1.dbf in %b. This is very useful for cases where you are moving the files to a different directory. You can also use it for creating image copies where you will create the backup in a different location with the same names as the parent file which will make it easy for identification.

One caveat: Oracle Managed Files don’t have a specific basename; so this can’t be used for those. Here are some more examples of the placeholders.

%f is the absolute file number 

%U is a system generated unique name similar to the %U in backup formats

%I is the Database ID

%N is the tablespace name

Source : Internet