Starting with 11g RMAN seems to allow a “backup validate database” even if the database is not in archive log mode:
SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.2.0 Production on Wed Mar 23 11:18:01 2011
Copyright (c) 1982, 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options
SQL> archive log list;
Database log mode No Archive Mode
Automatic archival Disabled
Archive destination /u01/oradata/ORA11/archive
Oldest online log sequence 140
Current log sequence 143
As you can see from the listing above the database is not in archive log mode. Nevertheless doing a “backup validate database” works:
<hostname>:/tmp# rman target /
Recovery Manager: Release 11.2.0.2.0 - Production on Wed Mar 23 11:18:25 2011
Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
connected to target database: ORA11(DBID=12345678)
RMAN> backup validate datafile 1;
Starting backup at 23-MAR-11
using target database control file instead of recovery catalog
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: SID=124 device type=DISK
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting full datafile backup set
channel ORA_DISK_1: specifying datafile(s) in backup set
input datafile file number=00001 name=/u01/oradata/ORA11/system01.dbf
channel ORA_DISK_1: backup set complete, elapsed time: 00:00:07
List of Datafiles
=================
File Status Marked Corrupt Empty Blocks Blocks Examined High SCN
---- ------ -------------- ------------ --------------- ----------
1 OK 0 47774 307200 404393656
File Name: <name>
Block Type Blocks Failing Blocks Processed
---------- -------------- ----------------
Data 0 237701
Index 0 19286
Other 0 2439
Doing the same with a 10g database yields:
<hostname>:/tmp# rman target /
Recovery Manager: Release 10.2.0.5.0 - Production on Wed Mar 23 11:19:20 2011
Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle. All rights reserved.
connected to target database: ORA10 (DBID=12343456)
RMAN> backup validate datafile 1;
Starting backup at 23-MAR-11
using target database control file instead of recovery catalog
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=201 devtype=DISK
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting full datafile backupset
channel ORA_DISK_1: specifying datafile(s) in backupset
RMAN-03009: failure of backup command on ORA_DISK_1 channel at 03/23/2011 11:19:27
ORA-19602: cannot backup or copy active file in NOARCHIVELOG mode
EMC offers so called cumulative hotfixes which include all available and tested hotfixes for a specific version. These hotfixes can be found at the following URL:
ftp://ftp.legato.com/pub/NetWorker/Cumulative_Hotfixes
For corrupting a block dd can be used. Just adjust the “ibs” argument to match your database block size and adjust “count” to specify the amount of blocks to be corrupted. “Seek” specifies how many blocks are skipped (counted from the beginning of the file) before writing the corrupted data.
dd ibs=8192 seek=100 count=110 if=/dev/zero of=test01.dbf conv=notrunc
Caution: This command WILL corrupt your data file. Use it ONLY on test systems and with a valid backup!
Altough not oracle related i successfully completed my certification as an MS SQL Server DBA. In most companies MS SQL is used for smaller databases in addition to oracle. So from my point of view it is a plus.
I am allowed to wear the title mentioned above from now on. But i guess i wont print it on my business cards…. Way too long :-)
Starting with Oracle 11g Release 2 there is a new tool called “chopt” which lets you enable or disable database features such as partitioning, olap and so on without the need to re-install the bianries.
You can read about the utility here.
This week a came across the following very interesting scenario:
The customer made an RMAN online backup and saved it to an NFS location. Controlfile autobackup was on. During backup the backupset was written to that NFS location. The control file however was written to the controlfile autobackup location (i.e. a different location).
After that the customer destroyed all disk groups and re-installed the database servers.
Afterwards he tried to restore the database which failed because there was no controlfile in the backups at all. In order to make it worse the customer had no log files from the RMAN backup session, no DBID and no trace files whatever – including the alert.log. This leaved us with the following situation:
- no autobackup anywhere
- no older controlfile available
- no snapshot controlfile available
- no redo log available
- no backup logfiles
- no “backup controlfile to trace” information
- no DBID
- no alert.log
Under normal circumstances restoring the database from an rman backup without having any control file is impossible. In this article i will show you an approach you might use to restore the datafile anyway.
Read more…
Just because i have to use google to find the solution often here the direct link for fixing nsr peer information error messages.
An example error message can be found below:
39078 19.10.2010 12:07:35 nsrexecd GSS error: There is already a machine using the
name: "clientname.domain.com". Either choose a different name for your machine, or
delete the "NSR peer information" entry for "clientname.domain.com" on
host: "networkerserver.domain.com"
Preston De Guise explained in his blog how to fix the error.
The linux sg3_utils are small tools intended for working with FC / SCSI / SATA / SAS hard driv.es. They can be used to send SCSI commands (for instance INQUIRY, LOG SENSE, …) to these devices.
sg3_utils can be found on freshmeat.
An in-depth description can be found here.
Starting with 11g Release 2 it is possible to store voting disks and OCR in ASM. But how does this affect ASM best practises?
Martin Decker found the updated Oracle document about this issue.
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For using Large Pages on Windows some settings are needed:
1. Start > Settings > Control Panel
2. click Administrative Tools.
3. click Local Security Policy.
4. Expand Local Policies and select User Rights Assignment.
5. Select Lock pages in memory and choose Action > Security...
6. Click Add...
7. Select the username that was used to install Oracle and the ora_dba group from the Name list.
8. Click Add.
9. Close Select Users or Groups dialog by pressing OK
10. Click OK to close the Local Security Policy Setting dialog.
11. Open Regedit
12. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OraDb10g_home1
13. Create a registry key (REG_SZ) named ORA_LPENABLE and set the value to 1
14. Reboot the server.
