RMAN-08138: WARNING: archived log not deleted

Usually we do not need a backup of archived logs on standby site if backup is already configured on the primary database. In such scenario, if we try to delete old archived logs which have already been applied on the standby database my return “RMAN-08138: WARNING: archived log not deleted - must create more backups” if archive deletion policy is not properly set in the standby database.

ORA-01654 and ORA-03234 for index tablespace

When tables grow in size because of new data coming in, indexes also grow, and sometime indexes can grow even bigger as compare to table itself. There is a possibility that you see ORA-01654 while inserting/updating data because tablespace holding the index cannot be further extended and needs manual intervention to extend the tablespace so that index could further grow. Error would be returned to the application as well as reported in the alert log file.

Error 3113 in Primary Database while connecting Standby

Sometime you may see following error stack in your primary database alert log file.

Wed May 31 08:02:37 2017 LNS: Attempting destination LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_2 network reconnect (3113) LNS: Destination LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_2 network reconnect abandoned Error 3113 for archive log file 9 to 'standby_db' Errors in file D:\ORACLE\11203\diag\rdbms\standby_db\mydb\trace\mydb_nsa2_3544.trc: ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel LNS: Failed to archive log 9 thread 1 sequence 61239 (3113)

Fatal NI connect error 12541

If you see this error message in the alert log file of your primary database in a dataguard environment, it is most likely that listener on the standby database host(s) is not running. As a result, primary database will not be able to ship redo data to the standby database. This failure of log shipping will add lines similar to the following in the alert log file of the primary database.

Fatal NI connect error 12547, connecting to:

Sometimes you may see following error message in your alert log file. There is a similar Fatal NI error 12537 that appears in the alert log file when session exists during the session creation phase. But error 12547 comes when session terminates abnormally. For example, client application crashes without properly exiting the database, or sessions gets disconnected because of a network disconnection.

How to Enable Block Change Tracking

In RMAN incremental backup strategy, enabling block change tracking significantly increases incremental RMAN backups performance by helping RMAN to find out only changed/modified blocks (since last full backup) very fast, because only these are the blocks to be backed up during an incremental backup. List of these blocks (changed since last full backup) is maintained in the block change tracking file. In this article I will explain how to enable block change tracking.

ORA-16179: incremental changes to "log_archive_dest_1" not allowed with SPFILE

This error comes when you use wrong syntax while setting log archive destination using   log_Archive_dest_n parameter.  I faced this error while trying to set log_archive_dest_1 parameter using ALTER SYSTEM command and the reason of this error was that I missed the keyword “location=” while specifying the destination directory. But this error may also come because of other syntax errors in the command while setting the parameter.     

ORA-01261: Parameter db_recovery_file_dest destination string cannot be translated

DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST parameter is used to set Fast Recovery Area for the instance and  archived logs, flashback logs, and RMAN backups are kept at this location and are automatically handled by the database. While using ALTER SYSTEM command to set db_recovery_file_dest parameter you might face following error.

ORA-00257 archiver error

There are a several archived log errors that exist, and there are several different reasons for these errors as well. As we know that redo log groups are used in a circular fashion and redo logs are reused again and again. After every log switch, the previous redo log file is archived (if database is running in archivelog mode). If oracle is not able to create an archived log file after a redo log switch ORA-00257 would appear, and after a few more redo log switches the turn of this redo log file would come again. Since oracle was not able to archived this redo log previously, it will not overwrite this redo log and database would hang. This redo log must be archived before it could be reused. Alert log would who errors as follows if it is not able to create an archived log file

ORA-48913: Writing into trace file failed, file size limit...

In some environments DBAs limit the size of trace files generated by the database. This included all trace files that could get generated under USER_DUMP_DEST/DIAGNOSTIC_DEST). The parameter to set the limit for trace files is MAX_DUMP_FILE_SIZE and its value is in OS number of blocks. After setting this value, if any trace file size would increase form the size specified in this parameter, ORA-48913 would be recorded in alert log file.