Re: Is it possible to recover just one datafile/tablespace "until cancel"?

Burt Peltier wrote:

> If all you lost were archived redo logs, you should not have had to do
> much , I think.
>
> Not sure what you did first, but the correct course of action might have
> been real simple. Of course, once you do 1 wrong command, the correct
> command may no longer work. Good reason to do a cold backup before doing
> any recovery.
>
> I once had a database crash in the middle of a hot backup. It looked like
> I needed to do some kind of recover.
>
> But, I think (been a while - doing this from poor memory) all I had to do
> was 'recover database' . Basically, because the datafiles were in "begin
> backup" mode, Oracle needed the current REDO log just to "sync" things up
> and take the datafiles out of backup mode.
>

This disaster just continues to run and run, doesn't it?

No, Burt. You didn't need to do 'recover database' at all (and if you'd just lost your archive logs, it wouldn't have worked in any case). All you need to do if you crash in the middle of a hot backup is 'alter database datafile x end backup'. That causes the headers of the files to be re-synchronised, and therefore an 'alter database open' would have worked. Of course there might be more than one file in hot backup mode, so a quick check of v$backup before doing anything is always in order.

The tragedy of Stan's predicament is that this is *not* what he did, but proceeded instead to muck about with incomplete recoveries on some files, and not on others, followed by Lord knows what else. And as you so wisely put it, once you've embarked upon a failed recovery, the correct recovery procedures are unlikely to work when they are (eventually) tried. The suggestion of a cold backup before starting any recovery is an excellent one -though often not practical in a production 24x7 environment :-(

And that's the particular boat Stan is now in, with offlined datafiles that cannot possibly be recovered, and no chance of doing an incomplete recovery. Data has been lost, and the situation is unrecoverable.

Regards
HJR Received on Tue Sep 30 2003 - 23:35:29 CDT