Resync of recovery catalog failed

The other day I noticed a problem in my recently configured 10.2.0.2 database, when I did one of my first backups:

RMAN> LIST BACKUP OF DATABASE SUMMARY;
2> CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE DISK FORMAT   ‘/san/otros/oracle/forma/rman/%d_%t_%s_%p’;
3> CROSSCHECK BACKUP;
4> CROSSCHECK ARCHIVELOG ALL;
5> DELETE FORCE NOPROMPT OBSOLETE;
6> BACKUP INCREMENTAL LEVEL 0 DATABASE;
7> BACKUP ARCHIVELOG ALL DELETE ALL INPUT;
8> DELETE NOPROMPT OBSOLETE;
9>
starting full resync of recovery catalog
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of list command at 04/17/2010 02:19:36
RMAN-03014: implicit resync of recovery catalog failed
RMAN-03009: failure of full resync command on default channel at 04/17/2010 02:19:36
ORA-00904: : invalid identifier

If you get this problem while making a RMAN backup, probably it’s because of an incompatibility between the target database and the recovery database. When

this happened to me, my catalog database was 10.2.0.4, and the target database 10.2.0.2. Also, the client of RMAN who launched the backup was 10.2.0.4.

If you use RMAN of version 10.2.0.4 connecting to a database with a lesser version, let’s say 10.2.0.2, you will get the following message:

Recovery Manager: Release 10.2.0.4.0 – Production on Mon Apr 19 09:00:59 2010

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

PL/SQL package SYS.DBMS_BACKUP_RESTORE version 10.02.00.02 in TARGET database is not current
PL/SQL package SYS.DBMS_RCVMAN version 10.02.00.02 in TARGET database is not current
connected to target database: FORMA (DBID=2479200434)
connected to recovery catalog database

You will still be able to make some backups, but you will eventually get errors. The solution is to use a lesser RMAN client, altough you can still use your

10.2.0.4 catalog database. In my case, I installed another ORACLE_HOME of version 10.2.0.1., so I launch the rman, jobs using the 10.2.0.1 client, connecting

to 10.2.0.2 target database, and using 10.2.0.4 catalog database.

It worked perfectly.