RMAN Delete Obsolete Wants to Delete Live Datafile After File is Copied via RMAN and Renamed via SqlPlus (Doc ID 460365.1)

Symptoms

A database has been copied from filesystem to ASM storage, using the RMAN COPY command.

The copy was done via RMAN but the renaming of the database files was done via SQLPlus using
'alter database rename file 'X' to 'Y').
Now the following messages are being recorded in the alert.log:

Fri Sep 7 13:28:16 2007
datafilecopy header validation failure for file
+<DISKGROUP>/<SID>/datafile/system.751.632615407
datafilecopy header validation failure for file
+<DISKGROUP>/<SID>/datafile/sysaux.758.632615429
datafilecopy header validation failure for file
+<DISKGROUP>/<SID>/datafile/users.770.632616013

Additionally:

- RMAN LIST COPY command lists all the new ASM files as datafilecopies
- RMAN REPORT OBSOLETE command lists the new ASM files as 'obsolete'
- Incremental Merge Backup scripts believe the new ASM files to be new datafile copies

This problem can occur with or without the use of an rman catalog and affects relocation of any database file to ANY new location where the renaming is done via SQLPlus instead of using the RMAN SWITCH command.

Cause

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